Polymarket trader tops daily list with $917,000 profit after Democratic midterm wins
Trader leads daily profits after House and Senate wins
A Polymarket trader known as 0xA2 topped the platform's daily leaderboard with $917,000 in profit after Democrats won both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US midterm elections.
Most of that profit is not yet final. It is tied to an active bet that still depends on the final result in Alaska.
Key numbers from the trader's bets
- 0xA2 placed $609,644 on Republicans not winning any Senate swing states when that outcome was priced at 36%.
- That market later rose to 87%, and the stake grew to $1.48 million, for a gain of about $860,000.
- The trader also made a realized profit of $106,115 from a bet that Democrats would win the Texas Senate.
- Polymarket traders gave a 14% chance to an upset in Alaska.
- Another active position was $1.42 million on the US not confirming that aliens exist before 2027.
Why the profit could still fall
The $860,000 gain from the swing-state bet is unrealized. That means it is based on current prices and could drop if Alaska produces an upset.
A 14% chance is small, but it is not zero. Experts cited in the report warned that outcomes with a 20% chance can still happen more often than people expect. One CoinShares researcher noted that an event given an 80% chance does not happen 80% of the time in a simple, guaranteed way.
Heavy trading during election night
The midterms drew large activity on Polymarket and Kalshi. A prediction market is a platform where people trade on the likely outcome of an event.
Midterm markets attracted more than $546 million in notional volume over two weeks, according to data cited from Prediction.com.
Kelly Ye of Talos said Kalshi odds of a Democratic sweep rose from about 74% to 99% as polls began closing at 6pm ET. Trading peaked between 8pm and 10pm ET, led by a small number of large trades, she said.
The report also said the top 10 Polymarket users profited more than $170,000 on the day. By comparison, on a random day in March, the top daily winner made $154,000 and the 10th winner made $29,700, according to archived leaderboard data cited in the report.
Recent forecasts that missed
Prediction markets have grown since the 2024 US presidential election. During that race, Polymarket's flagship market passed $3.6 billion in volume, and Bernstein analysts called it the world's largest election prediction market.
Dash, a data lead at Prediction.com, said politics remains a key driver of open interest even though sports now dominate trading volume.
Two weeks before the midterms, Polymarket traders gave Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva about a 20% chance of winning the Brazil presidential election. He went on to beat Flavio Bolsonaro and win a fourth term.
Experts said at the time that a ban on prediction markets in Brazil left odds to traders with little local knowledge to correct them. That example was cited as a reason not to treat the 14% Alaska chance as impossible.
Source for this report
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