She's the world's youngest self-made female billionaire

Watch on YouTube ↗  |  March 10, 2026 at 10:35  |  34:30  |  CNBC

Summary

  • Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara details the company's successful multi-year regulatory battle and unprecedented lawsuit against the CFTC to legalize US election prediction markets.
  • Lopes Lara predicts that event-based prediction markets will eventually surpass the traditional stock market in total size and volume.
  • The core thesis is that retail and institutional investors inherently prefer trading directly on real-world outcomes (e.g., inflation, elections, cultural events) rather than building inefficient proxy portfolios (e.g., shorting the S&P 500 to hedge political risk).
  • The company is currently focused on scaling its institutional business, expanding market categories, and capturing mainstream retail audiences.
Trade Ideas
Luana Lopes Lara Co-founder and COO, Kalshi 28:04
"We really think that prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. And I think the reason for that is that what prediction markets are is markets on anything that happens in the future... anyone in the world will have some opinion." Kalshi's landmark legal victory against the US government (CFTC) has officially de-risked and legalized event-based contracts as a financial asset class. While Kalshi is a private startup, this regulatory breakthrough creates a massive new Total Addressable Market (TAM) for public financial infrastructure companies. Forward-thinking brokerages (like Interactive Brokers, which recently launched its own prediction market, ForecastEx) and legacy derivative exchanges (CME, CBOE) are perfectly positioned to monetize this new retail and institutional demand by integrating event contracts into their existing platforms. LONG. The mainstreaming of prediction markets creates a net-new, high-margin revenue vertical for established public exchanges and brokerages that adapt to the event-trading boom. Private pure-play platforms (like Kalshi or crypto-native Polymarket) could monopolize the liquidity and volume, preventing legacy public exchanges from capturing meaningful market share. Additionally, future administrations could attempt to introduce new restrictive legislation against event betting.
Up Next

This CNBC video, published March 10, 2026, features Luana Lopes Lara discussing CBOE, IBKR, CME. 1 trade idea extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.

Speakers: Luana Lopes Lara  · Tickers: CBOE, IBKR, CME