Kalshi

Order Types on Kalshi and When to Use Each

Limit, market, resting and immediate. A short guide to expressing a view on an event exchange without paying more than the view is worth.

ProudGlobeHead Markets DeskSeptember 17, 20263 min read

One resting arrow and one arrow crossing a line

Once you have found a market and formed a view, the remaining question is how to get in without giving away more than the view is worth. On a venue where a typical edge is a few cents, execution is not a detail.

The two that matter

Limit order. You name a price. The order rests in the book until someone trades against it, or until you cancel it. You might not get filled at all.

Market order. You take whatever is available now. You get filled, and you pay the offer or hit the bid, which means you pay the spread.

Everything else is a variation on those two: an order that cancels if it cannot fill immediately, an order that fills partially or not at all, an order that expires at a set time.

The cost of crossing

The spread is a real cost and it is charged on both ends of a round trip. On a market quoted 60/64, buying and later selling at an unchanged market costs you four cents — nearly seven per cent of the position — before any fee. What a spread costs you does the arithmetic properly.

Resting a limit order at 61 instead of paying 64 saves three cents, if you get filled. That is the trade.

The cost of not being filled

This is the part people underweight. If your view is right, the market moves your way, and a resting order at 61 in a market that goes straight to 70 never fills. You saved three cents on a trade you did not make, and lost the entire gain.

The honest framing is that limit orders are cheap when the market is quiet and expensive when it is moving, which is exactly backwards from when you most want them. Selective patience works. Blanket patience does not.

A queue of rectangles of decreasing width — A resting order joins a queue. Position in that queue is the whole game.

A practical approach

Wide and quiet market: rest inside the spread. On a 60/64 market, offer 62. You are improving the quote, you are visible, and the cost of waiting is low because nothing is happening.

Tight and busy market: cross. On a 62/63 market, the spread is one cent and waiting to save it is not worth the risk of missing.

Event imminent: decide in advance whether you want the position, then act. Resting orders around a scheduled release get picked off by people who see the number before your order is cancelled. If you want to hold through a release, be in position early. Macro release markets covers what happens in those seconds.

Size larger than the top of book: work it in pieces. Taking the whole book at once walks the price against you, and the average fill can be far from the quote you saw. Depth and slippage is about measuring this before you find out the hard way.

Yes and No are the same order

Buying No at 40 and selling Yes at 60 are the same position. If the venue lets you do both, look at both sides of both books before choosing — occasionally one is better than the other, because the two sides attract different flow. Yes and No shares covers the identity.

Cancelling matters as much as placing

An order you forgot about is a standing offer to the entire market at a price you formed an hour ago. Stale resting orders are how people get filled on exactly the trades they no longer want. Review the book of your own open orders at least as often as you review the market.

The life of a Kalshi market, from listing through to the last tick before settlement.

Educational content only. Nothing here is financial advice, a solicitation, or an offer to trade. Prediction markets can move against you and a position can lose its entire value. Where this guide describes a difference between venues it describes a theoretical cross-market edge in observed prices, which is not a profit: fees, spreads, capital lockup, transfer time and differing settlement rules all come out of it first.