Investors watching Jump Trading’s prediction markets push learned this week that the high-frequency trading firm has doubled its dedicated team in the space this year, while simultaneously broadening the kind of people it is willing to hire to run it.
Simon Johansen, Jump’s head of prediction markets, told Bloomberg the firm is recruiting outside its usual elite quantitative pipeline, targeting traders operating from university dormitories and former accountants with a background in sports betting. The reason is structural, not fashionable.
Why Prediction Markets Demand a Different Skill Set
Prediction markets are event contracts (financial instruments that pay out based on real-world outcomes, such as election results or sports scores). Unlike equities or FX, they often cover events with limited historical data. A FIFA World Cup happens once every four years; a specific political election may have no close precedent at all. That makes the deep statistical datasets that underpin traditional quantitative models less useful.
‘It’s a bit less data-reliant in terms of how you build and train a model,’ Johansen said. ‘It’s a bit more heavily weighted on real-time data and feedback of what you’re actually seeing on the field.’
Johansen said the firm is looking for people who understand the events being traded as well as the market itself. Someone who has spent years betting on football knows instinctively how information flows around a match; a quant who has never watched a game may struggle to calibrate that in real time.
Jump Trading’s Prediction Markets Bet Goes Beyond Market-Making
Jump began making markets on Kalshi late in 2024, marking one of the earliest entries by a major proprietary trading firm into the event-betting sector. It has since expanded to provide liquidity on Polymarket as well.
Earlier this year, Jump went further by acquiring minority stakes in both platforms. According to CoinDesk, citing people with knowledge of the matter, its stake in Kalshi is fixed, while its stake in Polymarket is variable and grows with trading capacity. The two platforms carry substantial valuations: Kalshi is valued at $11 billion and Polymarket at $9 billion, according to reporting on the deal.
Jump is not alone in treating prediction markets as institutional territory. Susquehanna International Group disclosed in 2024 that it would act as a market maker on Kalshi, and subsequently joined Robinhood Markets in acquiring a majority stake in LedgerX, a US-based derivatives exchange, with Susquehanna serving as a day-one liquidity provider there.
Volume Growth Has Been Rapid, Though Figures Vary by Window
The snippet cites prediction market volumes topping $50 billion in June, reflecting broad sector activity. For context on the trajectory: combined monthly global trading volume on Kalshi and Polymarket rose from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to approximately $24 billion in April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from The Block. The two volume figures cover different time windows and are not directly comparable, but both point in the same direction.
Kalshi alone recorded a year-to-date trading volume of approximately $114.88 billion, with April 2026 monthly volume at $14.81 billion, up 20.5% month-over-month, according to DeFi Rate.
What This Means for Brokers and ISA Investors Watching the Sector
UK retail investors cannot currently access prediction market contracts through standard ISA or SIPP wrappers, but the institutionalisation of the sector has knock-on effects worth tracking. As firms like Jump embed prediction markets into their trading infrastructure, they are creating demand for professional execution tools, market data feeds, and risk management systems. Companies serving those needs sit across listed exchanges and financial technology providers.
Jump Trading’s prediction markets expansion also signals something broader about how quantitative finance is evolving. The firm’s willingness to hire people whose edge comes from domain knowledge rather than dataset mastery suggests the boundaries between specialised industry expertise and financial modelling are narrowing in event-driven markets.
The near-term catalyst to watch is the FIFA World Cup cycle. With a tournament on the horizon, prediction market volumes in sports contracts are likely to test infrastructure and liquidity at scale, revealing which market makers have built durable operations and which have merely followed the flow.
