Why Kalshi's "Profit" column isn't profit

And how to calculate your real prediction-market P&L in under a minute

If you've downloaded your settlement history from Kalshi and felt great about the green numbers, read this before you celebrate. The column most traders read as profit is actually gross payout — and the difference can be enormous.

What the export says
+$25,683
True P&L (cost basis)
−$2,800
After all fees
−$3,715

A real example from an actual Kalshi account export — a $29,000 gap between the headline number and reality.

What the export actually shows

When a Kalshi event contract settles in your favor, each contract pays out $1.00. Kalshi's settlement export records the total dollars returned to you at settlement. If you held 1,000 winning contracts, the export shows +$1,000 — regardless of what you paid for them.

But you didn't get $1,000 of profit. If you bought those contracts at 95¢, you paid $950 — so your actual gain was $50, not $1,000. Every settled market in the export inflates your apparent results this way. The more you trade, the bigger the illusion grows.

The real formula

real P&L per settlement = payout − (contracts held × average price paid)
net P&L = real P&L − trading fees − deposit fees

Two things make this tedious to compute by hand. First, your average cost per contract lives in a different export (the activity file) than your settlements. Second, fees accumulate quietly across hundreds of trades — trading fees on each fill, plus deposit fees — and none of them appear in the settlement totals.

Rule of thumb: if you tend to buy heavy favorites (contracts priced 90¢+), your gross payout will dwarf your actual profit — you're collecting many small edges, and the export makes each one look like a windfall.

Why this matters

Traders make decisions based on the score they think they have. If your mental ledger says +$25k while your bank account quietly disagrees, you'll size bets wrong, chase categories that are actually losing you money, and underestimate how much fees are eating your returns. Knowing your real number is the single highest-value piece of information in your trading.

Check your real number in under a minute

TruePL is a free analyzer that computes true cost-basis P&L from your Kalshi exports: download your activity and settlements CSVs from Kalshi, drop both files onto the page, and you get your real P&L (before and after fees), win rate, average win vs. average loss, P&L by category, fee accumulation over time, and your biggest wins and losses.

Everything runs in your browser. Your files are never uploaded — there's no server, no account, and no tracking. Close the tab and it's gone.

Most traders don't know their real number.

Takes under a minute to find out yours.

Get my true P&L — free