Is betting replacing bonds?

As prediction market traders collect $400,000 windfalls on the US ousting Venezuela’s president, concerns about insider trading, legality, and ethics continue to swirl around the booming business of real events betting.

Yet despite the eye-popping profits making headlines, a popular new prediction market strategy calls for a more measured approach: Instead of making bold bets on unlikely outcomes to win a huge payday, users are generating smaller, but still substantial, returns by playing it safe.

“Bonding,” as some traders have dubbed it, is not what caffeine-addled Polymarket users are doing with other real human beings—it’s the idea that by going long on a contract that is already likely to happen, you can accrue income over time, sort of like a traditional fixed-income investment.

Here’s an example: Andrew Courtney, a hobby trader on Kalshi who also runs a site called Kalshinomics, placed a bet on President Trump being inaugurated on November 18—after Trump had already won the election. The return was 2 cents on an investment of 98 cents over 63 days, a roughly 12.4% annualized return, he noted in a recent Substack post.

If you’re a fixed-income aficionado aghast at the perversion of traditional investment vehicles, you might be muttering to yourself, “Jesus Christ.” Well, traders are betting on him, too: Polymarket users wagered $3.3 million on Jesus Christ’s return in 2025. If you bet “no” when bets surged around Easter, your annualized return was 5.5%—higher than the return of US Treasury bills.

Predicting chaos

Bonding is an imprecise science, and even expert traders aren’t always doing it right, warned Courtney.

“One way you can lose bonding is you’re buying for 98 cents on the dollar, but the event is only 95% actually going to happen,” Courtney told Brew Markets. “Make sure you're not just selling something that is unlikely to happen. You need to have a reason that you think the odds are 99% versus 95%.”

To be clear: While profits on a single, well-placed bonding bet look compelling, nobody really thinks this is a reliable strategy to replace fixed income in your portfolio.

But if we have learned anything in 2025, it’s that the wild world of event gambling is just getting wilder.

Today, for example, we saw the emergence of a market that lets you bet on other prediction market odds. Sometimes, the punchlines write themselves.—LB