William Berg

The arbitrage opportunity in an event contract you noticed probably isn’t real. The price gap might exist, but once you factor in the costs of closing both sides on two platforms, dealing with different order books, and having your money tied up for weeks until settlement, the advantage usually disappears. This isn’t a guide to finding live arbs. It’s a guide to figuring out whether the one you think you’ve found is worth acting on.

In January 2026, a US Army Master Sergeant named Gannon Ken Van Dyke allegedly walked away with $400,000 from a prediction market. He’d bet on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He knew it was coming because he helped plan it. That’s the story that broke the dam. Lesser-known stories are also cropping up, including the Google software engineer who allegedly made around $1.2 million by using internal data to make a batch of trades on Polymarket.

Polymarket handled more than $3.6 billion just on the 2024 US presidential election. In September 2024, Kalshi won a federal court case allowing it to offer political event contracts in the US, despite objections from the CFTC. Some of this volume, along with growing interest, comes from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, where Islamic finance is the standard, not a specialty. This naturally leads to the question: Are prediction markets allowed or not for Muslim traders?