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Vultax Research · published snapshot · UTC
49.5hike49.5hold

The Fed is a coin flip on Polymarket. Kalshi agrees to within half a cent.

Days before the 16 September decision, a hundred million dollars has traded on one question and the crowd has no answer. Every contract on both venues, the gap between them, who is trading it and how big they bet, the biggest moves of the month, and what July looked like from the same distance. This page re-reads both venues and our own fills every ten minutes until the decision.

Prices are the venues' quoted probabilities for the chosen contract

NOWAll five
Every contract, both venues, and the last 24 hours' move
Polymarket's quoted probability and Kalshi's last hourly close. The expected move is the probability-weighted change in the target rate.
FIG 1Thirty days
Probability of a 25 bp hike, Polymarket vs Kalshi
Last quoted price each day. Hover or use ←/→. The marked day is the CPI print.
Polymarket: CLOB price history, hourly. Kalshi: hourly candles, close.Both public APIs.
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What the venues say

That is not two markets disagreeing; it is two markets saying the same thing with the precision of a coin. The interesting number is not either probability but the distance between them, because that distance is what an arbitrage bot would be paid to close, and it has been inside the fee floor for most of the month.

FIG 2The gap
Polymarket minus Kalshi on the hike contract, cents
Positive means Polymarket is more hawkish. The band is the taker-fee floor a round trip would pay at 50 cents on both venues.
Daily, last price. Fee floor: Polymarket 0.04 × p(1−p) on politics, Kalshi 0.07 × p(1−p), both at p = 0.5.About 2.75 cents per dollar, two legs.
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Why the gap does not pay

Polymarket charges takers C × feeRate × p × (1 − p) with a 0.04 rate on politics and economics markets at the time of writing, and makers nothing; Kalshi charges takers 0.07 × C × p × (1 − p). At 50 cents that is 1.0 cent per contract on Polymarket and 1.75 cents on Kalshi: a taker on both legs pays about 2.75 cents per dollar before slippage. The largest gap in the last thirty days, , was inside that floor. In July, Vultax watched the same venues on matched Fed-rate contracts every 85 seconds for a day and found the exact-match pair held a 5.7-cent gap that never closed; the September contracts are better matched and, as a result, tighter.

The month's biggest moves

FIG 3Moves
The largest hourly moves in the hike probability, last 30 days
Polymarket's hike contract, hour to hour. The 4 September jobs report and the late-August repricing are visible by timestamp.
Move is the change in the quoted probability between consecutive hourly readings.Times are UTC.
FIG 4Kalshi's book
Kalshi open interest and daily volume on the hike contract
Open interest is the number of contracts outstanding at the end of each day; volume is contracts traded that day.
Kalshi hourly candles, KXFEDDECISION-26SEP-H25.
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Who is trading it, and how big they bet

FIG 5Bet size
Fills on the three contracts by size, last seven days
Count of fills and dollars in each size band. Most fills are small; most dollars are not.
Notional is size × price per fill.Vultax's observed fills.
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The biggest bets of the day

FIG 6The lean
Which way the last 24 hours of money leaned, per contract
Net dollars toward "yes" on each contract: buying Yes or selling No counts toward yes; the reverse counts against. From Vultax's observed fills.
A positive bar is money betting the outcome happens.
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FIG 7Thirty days of flow
Fills on the three contracts by day, last 30 days
Trades per day. The decision draws its volume in the last fortnight.
Vultax's observed fills; notional and wallets in the table.
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FIG 8Hour of day
When the Fed contracts trade, by hour of day
Share of the last 30 days' fills in each UTC hour. US data releases land at 12:30 and 14:00 UTC.
Vultax's observed fills.Compare the all-market profile in the cadence study.
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FIG 9Seven days
Fills on the three September contracts, by hour
Every trade Vultax's pipeline observed on hike, hold and cut over the last seven days. Hover for trades and notional.
Public on-chain fills; notional is size × price.Seven days to UTC.
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What the bond market says

FIG 11Bills and notes
Bills and the two-year note against the effective funds rate
Daily par yields from the U.S. Treasury and the New York Fed\u2019s effective rate, last 45 trading days. A bill above the funds rate is a market expecting a hike within its life.
Hover or use ←/→.
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CONTEXTThe calendar
What lands before the decision, and what the Fed is saying
The last CPI print from the BLS, the release calendar, and the Federal Reserve's own press and speech feeds.
BLS API; federalreserve.gov feeds.
CONTEXTIn the news
What is being written about the decision right now
The latest headlines matching the decision, via Google News. Links go to the publisher.
Headlines are the publishers' own; Vultax does not endorse them.

What July looked like from here

FIG 10Since we started watching
The hike probability on both venues, every ten minutes, since this page went live
Our own polling record. It starts on 6 September and lengthens with every refresh until the decision.
Hover or use ←/→.
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What to watch until the 16th

Method and limits

Polymarket prices are the CLOB price history for each contract's Yes token at hourly fidelity and the event's quoted probabilities; Kalshi prices, volume and open interest are hourly candles from its public trade API. A refresher re-reads both and Vultax's copy of public on-chain fills every ten minutes; if a source fails, the previous reading is kept and the page says so. Fill counts undercount fills not yet ingested at read time; "new wallets" means wallets not seen in Vultax's 22 August to 2 September activity window. Fee rates are as published by each venue on 5 September 2026. Nothing here is a forecast of the decision, and nothing here is financial advice.