I love to use statistics to build efficient predictive models. @Kalshi Affiliate Trader.
Sydney, Australia
Joined April 2011
- Tweets1.7K
- Following633
- Followers1K
- Likes3.1K
Pinned Tweet
Excited to finally share with the public what we've been working on for over a year! It's hard to overstate how much of a game changer this is
@Kalshi, the first federally regulated exchange dedicated to trading on events, is now in public Beta at kalshi.com. This is a momentous event, one that marks a “new horizon” for the derivatives market. 1/
Luis Usier retweeted
Nate Silver doubts that one of the best election forecasters in the world is a profitable trader. Guys like @PoliticalKiwi ,@iabvek @nonsenseking , @tehspeleeng , @carnitastaco , and @LanceupperPI are my heroes when it comes to election modeling.
Kalshi has become the place where price discovery happens on elections, then on crypto, then on sports... now, it's going to become where price discovery happens for equities. Unfettered markets are a really powerful tool.
Single stock perps (SSPs) are here. And they're a truly great product. You don’t need to pay rollover fees like with futures, they’re simpler to trade than options, and you can go short just as easy as you can go long.
This is one of the most consequential products we’ve launched and I couldn’t be more proud of the team that worked for over a year to bring them to life. Just this morning, since the stealth launch, our users traded over $300m.
Grateful to be the ones bringing these to America in a regulated way 💚
Luis Usier retweeted
Single stock perps (SSPs) are here. And they're a truly great product. You don’t need to pay rollover fees like with futures, they’re simpler to trade than options, and you can go short just as easy as you can go long.
This is one of the most consequential products we’ve launched and I couldn’t be more proud of the team that worked for over a year to bring them to life. Just this morning, since the stealth launch, our users traded over $300m.
Grateful to be the ones bringing these to America in a regulated way 💚
Luis Usier retweeted
THE HUGE WIN FOR PREDICTION MARKETS
My only take from last night. Both in the runup to the vote and on election night, the prediction markets did exactly what they were supposed to do. A big confident forecast in the runup, and incredibly timely conveying of data as it dropped.
Luis Usier retweeted
The NYT STARTED their needle at 8:37pm
Kalshi was already at 99% house, 98% Senate
The future of news is real time and markets based 💚
When we were raising the Series A, I was living in London. Coincidentally, both Tarek and Luana decided to also live in London for a few months.
I thought we would work London hours; I was wrong. They stayed in SF hours throughout. We would meet at 4AM to work on projections!
Luis Usier retweeted
PSA to all of election Twitter and anyone else interested in the Midterms,
Kalshi's "field" view will be how you want to monitor election night as the votes are coming in.
The circles, which represent individual Senate markets, will rapidly move on the field to either side and grow as volume is flowing into these markets.
Once races are settled or resolved, they will be resolved from the field and counted in the "settled" column.
You will definitely want to check this out on election night and before. The House version of this graphic is crazy
Luis Usier retweeted
it's been over a year since i joined kalshi, and the next chapter is more exciting than ever
going all in takes real commitment, but it's much easier when @mansourtarek_ and @luanalopeslara are leading by example everyday
no better team to be building on the frontier with 💚
Kalshi just raised an additional $1B, valuing the company at $40B. This will help us expand into stocks, compute, indices, and institutional.
Tomorrow marks 8 years since we got accepted into YC and the journey began.
The odds of a kid from Lebanon getting here were pretty low.
Growing up there was great, but very challenging. We went through war. We had bombs explode in front of my house. I watched brilliant people’s lives destroyed for reasons beyond their control.
Lebanon is an unpredictable country. That unpredictability made it hard to plan for success. And yet despite it all, my mom sacrificed everything to give me and my brother the chance to go back to the US.
I found my refuge in two things: anime and math. Especially math.
I loved math because it calmed me. It was the opposite of unpredictable: clear, deterministic, orderly, and consistent. The proof is either right or wrong. I find that elegant and beautiful.
I was lucky.
I made it to my dream school, MIT (largely thanks to my mom), and my love for math quickly translated to a love for statistics, probability, and markets.
I love markets for a lot of the same reasons. Their incentives are clear: you get rewarded for being right and for pursuing knowledge. They are effective weighting machines for people’s opinions. They provide an incentive to be truthful, because they separate good information from bad information. They let people challenge the consensus and be rewarded for being right.
IMO, Hayek, Surowiecki, Hanson, Tetlock were the founding fathers of prediction markets. The more I read them, the more obsessed I got with the idea of applying market-based pricing to more things.
Markets bring rigor and critical thinking to more questions. And in an increasingly polarized and information-positioned word, I believe we need that more than ever.
Markets would also let people predict and manage more things outside of their control. And the world was becoming increasingly more unpredictable, and more like Lebanon, not less.
That love for markets got Luana and me to build Kalshi.
At first, it was mostly an idea we couldn’t stop talking about. We didn’t have much money. Luana’s sister bought the Kalshi domain name for us (for ~$1.7k). We moved to SF to get started, and embarked on a long, uncertain journey to build a regulated exchange.
The paranoia and anxiety from my childhood never left me. Even when things are going well, I think about what could go wrong. When people trust you with their money, that instinct serves a purpose.
I wanted us to build something that would hold up under pressure.
The first principle we defined at the company: regulatory-first. We worked with regulators for years before we listed a single market. We took every step to do things the right way and always asked for approval before proceeding. It was very hard at times, especially when we were being overtaken by competitors, but we believe doing things the right way matters.
Luana and I aren’t the only ones.
Our team put years of their lives into something far from certain. That’s especially true of Lior, Brandon, Rainer, Luis, Xavier, and Josef, who stuck with us for years. They believed when there was little to point to. And they stuck with us no matter how long it took. Kalshi is the result of an arduous journey through a long desert where, at times, most people didn’t understand why we were making the walk.
Many people still don’t understand what we’re doing and some disagree with us. Markets have historically taken time to be understood and accepted by some. But while not always obvious, their benefits are vast: capital markets help allocate capital and derivative markets help predict and manage uncertainty.
I firmly believe in these benefits, and that’s why I am dedicating my life to building this market.
Markets have caused issues many times in the past, and they certainly can present harms (manipulation, insiders, and addictive behaviors). These harms are more acute for certain types of markets (sports, short-term options, etc.) than others. It’s why I believe that guardrails need to exist and why we have taken the approach we have taken. We have consistently prioritized thinking critically about the risks and building the appropriate safeguards, sometimes beyond what the regulators require us to do. Many believe more needs to be done, and that’s a conversation I welcome.
Over time, I believe more people will see what we see: markets can help us get smarter and manage the future with more rigor, more precision, and more certainty than we have today.
To our tens of millions of users: you have made Kalshi bigger than anything Luana and I could have possibly imagined. Thank you for trusting us and thank you for coming along on the journey. I feel a strong responsibility to build a company worthy of that trust.
I am so lucky to spend my life building something I love. I hope everyone finds something they care about that much. Something that keeps you curious. Something that pushes you to your limits. Something that may put you at odds with the status quo. Something worth the hard days.
For me, it’s still markets. The more I learn, the more I want to understand.
Luis Usier retweeted
In 2024, I had an idea: figure out a way for people to trade on any song, album, or artist. A friend showed me Kalshi, and I became obsessed. I knew instantly there was no place I'd rather work.
It took me a little while to get hired, about a year or so, but I told myself, “If @mansourtarek_ and @luanalopeslara didn't give up after going through 60+ lawyers to get regulated, neither should I.”
Now I get to work with some of my closest friends building the coolest product out there. Today, @Kalshi is a $40 billion company. Crazy.
I'm glad I sent that binder.
Kalshi has had a lot of success over the past two years, and looking from the outside it may look like it’s easy. That wasn’t the case.
Nothing about Kalshi was ever easy. The odds were against the us from the beginning. It was Tarek and Luana’s sheer willpower that got us here.
Kalshi just raised an additional $1B, valuing the company at $40B. This will help us expand into stocks, compute, indices, and institutional.
Tomorrow marks 8 years since we got accepted into YC and the journey began.
The odds of a kid from Lebanon getting here were pretty low.
Growing up there was great, but very challenging. We went through war. We had bombs explode in front of my house. I watched brilliant people’s lives destroyed for reasons beyond their control.
Lebanon is an unpredictable country. That unpredictability made it hard to plan for success. And yet despite it all, my mom sacrificed everything to give me and my brother the chance to go back to the US.
I found my refuge in two things: anime and math. Especially math.
I loved math because it calmed me. It was the opposite of unpredictable: clear, deterministic, orderly, and consistent. The proof is either right or wrong. I find that elegant and beautiful.
I was lucky.
I made it to my dream school, MIT (largely thanks to my mom), and my love for math quickly translated to a love for statistics, probability, and markets.
I love markets for a lot of the same reasons. Their incentives are clear: you get rewarded for being right and for pursuing knowledge. They are effective weighting machines for people’s opinions. They provide an incentive to be truthful, because they separate good information from bad information. They let people challenge the consensus and be rewarded for being right.
IMO, Hayek, Surowiecki, Hanson, Tetlock were the founding fathers of prediction markets. The more I read them, the more obsessed I got with the idea of applying market-based pricing to more things.
Markets bring rigor and critical thinking to more questions. And in an increasingly polarized and information-positioned word, I believe we need that more than ever.
Markets would also let people predict and manage more things outside of their control. And the world was becoming increasingly more unpredictable, and more like Lebanon, not less.
That love for markets got Luana and me to build Kalshi.
At first, it was mostly an idea we couldn’t stop talking about. We didn’t have much money. Luana’s sister bought the Kalshi domain name for us (for ~$1.7k). We moved to SF to get started, and embarked on a long, uncertain journey to build a regulated exchange.
The paranoia and anxiety from my childhood never left me. Even when things are going well, I think about what could go wrong. When people trust you with their money, that instinct serves a purpose.
I wanted us to build something that would hold up under pressure.
The first principle we defined at the company: regulatory-first. We worked with regulators for years before we listed a single market. We took every step to do things the right way and always asked for approval before proceeding. It was very hard at times, especially when we were being overtaken by competitors, but we believe doing things the right way matters.
Luana and I aren’t the only ones.
Our team put years of their lives into something far from certain. That’s especially true of Lior, Brandon, Rainer, Luis, Xavier, and Josef, who stuck with us for years. They believed when there was little to point to. And they stuck with us no matter how long it took. Kalshi is the result of an arduous journey through a long desert where, at times, most people didn’t understand why we were making the walk.
Many people still don’t understand what we’re doing and some disagree with us. Markets have historically taken time to be understood and accepted by some. But while not always obvious, their benefits are vast: capital markets help allocate capital and derivative markets help predict and manage uncertainty.
I firmly believe in these benefits, and that’s why I am dedicating my life to building this market.
Markets have caused issues many times in the past, and they certainly can present harms (manipulation, insiders, and addictive behaviors). These harms are more acute for certain types of markets (sports, short-term options, etc.) than others. It’s why I believe that guardrails need to exist and why we have taken the approach we have taken. We have consistently prioritized thinking critically about the risks and building the appropriate safeguards, sometimes beyond what the regulators require us to do. Many believe more needs to be done, and that’s a conversation I welcome.
Over time, I believe more people will see what we see: markets can help us get smarter and manage the future with more rigor, more precision, and more certainty than we have today.
To our tens of millions of users: you have made Kalshi bigger than anything Luana and I could have possibly imagined. Thank you for trusting us and thank you for coming along on the journey. I feel a strong responsibility to build a company worthy of that trust.
I am so lucky to spend my life building something I love. I hope everyone finds something they care about that much. Something that keeps you curious. Something that pushes you to your limits. Something that may put you at odds with the status quo. Something worth the hard days.
For me, it’s still markets. The more I learn, the more I want to understand.
Luis Usier retweeted
I first heard about Kalshi as a senior in college, 6 years ago, and I loved the idea immediately: I felt like prediction markets solved an urgent need in the world. But I still wasn’t sure that joining the company was the right next step for me. Instead of going to a ~10 person startup, I could instead take a job at a big tech or trading firm.
My view changed as soon as I met the team: everyone I spoke to - among them @mansourtarek_ , @luanalopeslara , @luishusier , and @_rainerds - was so passionate, curious, and thoughtful. It became clear to me that even if the company didn’t succeed - if I gave it my all, I could learn a lot by working with such talented people.
Kalshi has had its ups and downs, but that first impression has held true for every day of my last 6 years. Remarkably, as we’ve grown, the challenges have grown too. I have felt at times incredibly stressed, but that all is 100x easier to bear with the right people around you and the knowledge that you’re working through difficult, worthy problems together.
With an announcement like this one, it’s easy to look back in hindsight and say that I made the right choice. But I’d feel the same way even if today’s news was very different, and we were still 10 people grinding away.
I’m so grateful for having had the opportunity to build with this team, and I look forward to many more years and even tougher problems to solve together. If you’re interested in joining us, send me a message!
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
Kalshi just raised an additional $1B, valuing the company at $40B. This will help us expand into stocks, compute, indices, and institutional.
Tomorrow marks 8 years since we got accepted into YC and the journey began.
The odds of a kid from Lebanon getting here were pretty low.
Growing up there was great, but very challenging. We went through war. We had bombs explode in front of my house. I watched brilliant people’s lives destroyed for reasons beyond their control.
Lebanon is an unpredictable country. That unpredictability made it hard to plan for success. And yet despite it all, my mom sacrificed everything to give me and my brother the chance to go back to the US.
I found my refuge in two things: anime and math. Especially math.
I loved math because it calmed me. It was the opposite of unpredictable: clear, deterministic, orderly, and consistent. The proof is either right or wrong. I find that elegant and beautiful.
I was lucky.
I made it to my dream school, MIT (largely thanks to my mom), and my love for math quickly translated to a love for statistics, probability, and markets.
I love markets for a lot of the same reasons. Their incentives are clear: you get rewarded for being right and for pursuing knowledge. They are effective weighting machines for people’s opinions. They provide an incentive to be truthful, because they separate good information from bad information. They let people challenge the consensus and be rewarded for being right.
IMO, Hayek, Surowiecki, Hanson, Tetlock were the founding fathers of prediction markets. The more I read them, the more obsessed I got with the idea of applying market-based pricing to more things.
Markets bring rigor and critical thinking to more questions. And in an increasingly polarized and information-positioned word, I believe we need that more than ever.
Markets would also let people predict and manage more things outside of their control. And the world was becoming increasingly more unpredictable, and more like Lebanon, not less.
That love for markets got Luana and me to build Kalshi.
At first, it was mostly an idea we couldn’t stop talking about. We didn’t have much money. Luana’s sister bought the Kalshi domain name for us (for ~$1.7k). We moved to SF to get started, and embarked on a long, uncertain journey to build a regulated exchange.
The paranoia and anxiety from my childhood never left me. Even when things are going well, I think about what could go wrong. When people trust you with their money, that instinct serves a purpose.
I wanted us to build something that would hold up under pressure.
The first principle we defined at the company: regulatory-first. We worked with regulators for years before we listed a single market. We took every step to do things the right way and always asked for approval before proceeding. It was very hard at times, especially when we were being overtaken by competitors, but we believe doing things the right way matters.
Luana and I aren’t the only ones.
Our team put years of their lives into something far from certain. That’s especially true of Lior, Brandon, Rainer, Luis, Xavier, and Josef, who stuck with us for years. They believed when there was little to point to. And they stuck with us no matter how long it took. Kalshi is the result of an arduous journey through a long desert where, at times, most people didn’t understand why we were making the walk.
Many people still don’t understand what we’re doing and some disagree with us. Markets have historically taken time to be understood and accepted by some. But while not always obvious, their benefits are vast: capital markets help allocate capital and derivative markets help predict and manage uncertainty.
I firmly believe in these benefits, and that’s why I am dedicating my life to building this market.
Markets have caused issues many times in the past, and they certainly can present harms (manipulation, insiders, and addictive behaviors). These harms are more acute for certain types of markets (sports, short-term options, etc.) than others. It’s why I believe that guardrails need to exist and why we have taken the approach we have taken. We have consistently prioritized thinking critically about the risks and building the appropriate safeguards, sometimes beyond what the regulators require us to do. Many believe more needs to be done, and that’s a conversation I welcome.
Over time, I believe more people will see what we see: markets can help us get smarter and manage the future with more rigor, more precision, and more certainty than we have today.
To our tens of millions of users: you have made Kalshi bigger than anything Luana and I could have possibly imagined. Thank you for trusting us and thank you for coming along on the journey. I feel a strong responsibility to build a company worthy of that trust.
I am so lucky to spend my life building something I love. I hope everyone finds something they care about that much. Something that keeps you curious. Something that pushes you to your limits. Something that may put you at odds with the status quo. Something worth the hard days.
For me, it’s still markets. The more I learn, the more I want to understand.
Luis Usier retweeted
there's a massive opportunity to rethink financial services for people who work and build businesses across borders. @andferminiano and the @LootRushInc team are going after it.
love their ambition and excited to be working together!
Work went global years ago. Money stayed local.
@LootRushInc built a global account for a generation of freelancers, creators, and entrepreneurs to get paid from anywhere and pay anyone in their local currency.
We're proud to power their growth 🤝
Luis Usier retweeted
Yes, a bet and a trade often look similar.
But how they work is fundamentally different.
A sportsbook sets the odds and takes the other side of your bet. Prediction markets are markets, where buyers and sellers compete to discover and produce efficient prices and enable important public benefits.
What the market is about can change, but the structure doesn't.
My op-ed on prediction markets and regulation:
A dream come true for us. The greatest power of prediction markets has always been getting useful information about the world, and publicly traded indices are the one of the best ways to achieve that.
S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kalshi are joining forces to build the next generation of financial markets.
The Dow launched in 1896. The S&P 500 in 1957. The idea was simple: bring individual stocks together into a single benchmark, giving people a clearer view of the broader market.
Over time, products built around those benchmarks transformed investing. Index funds, ETFs, futures, and options gave investors ways to gain diversified market exposure and hedge broad market swings.
These indices became foundations of global finance. More than $20 trillion is indexed or benchmarked to the S&P 500 alone.
Today, this structure extends beyond stocks to bonds, commodities, currencies, and more.
The next step is to bring that structure to the events that shape everyone’s lives.
Through this partnership, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Kalshi will work together to create indices composed of Kalshi event contracts.
Think about what that opens up.
An index of political power. An index of supply chain risk. An index tracking AI’s impact on employment. An index of sports outcomes that affect broadcasters, advertisers, cities, and small businesses. An index of weather risks that shape harvests, energy demand, and business revenues.
Each would bundle event contracts into a single indicator, helping people understand how related risks are evolving.
Over time, products built around these indices could offer diversified exposure to those events and new ways to hedge their impact.
The events that shape our lives could become as easy to track and gain exposure to as the S&P 500.
Luis Usier retweeted
Thank you for having me @CBSLosAngeles to speak about prediction market hedging!
Many speculate (or "bet", as you call it) on prediction markets, just like they do on any derivatives market. But the exchange structure harnesses that speculation for price discovery and enables risk management for individuals and businesses, big or small.
Over time, prediction markets will let people manage exposure to most things outside of our control. We're in the early innings of that. Incredibly excited to be part of building that future.
Luis Usier retweeted
“Golden is emblematic of how these new markets have allowed unlikely people to take a swing at some of the smartest minds on Wall Street."
bloomberg.com/news/features/…
