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Prediction markets are heading north. Wealthsimple, Canada’s largest online brokerage, is teaming up with Kalshi to launch Wealthsimple Predict, a dedicated app that will give Canadian investors access to nearly 4,000 event contracts for the first time through a regulated platform.
The product is set to go live in summer 2026, making Wealthsimple the second entity in Canada, after Interactive Brokers Canada, to offer forecast contracts under the country’s evolving regulatory framework. It’s a meaningful milestone for a country that banned short-term binary options back in 2017 due to fraud concerns.
What Wealthsimple Predict actually does
You buy a contract that pays $1 if a specific event happens and $0 if it doesn’t. The market price at any given moment reflects what traders collectively believe the probability of that outcome is.
If a contract on whether Canadian inflation will exceed 3% next month is trading at $0.65, the market is essentially saying there’s a 65% chance it happens. Buy at $0.65, and you pocket $0.35 per contract if you’re right.
Wealthsimple Predict will focus exclusively on three categories: economic indicators, financial markets, and climate trends. All contracts will have settlement periods of 30 days or longer. Sports and election contracts are completely off the table.
The regulatory path that made this possible
Canada’s securities regulators imposed a sweeping ban on short-term binary options in 2017, driven by a wave of fraud that had burned retail investors. That changed when the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, known as CIRO, began warming to a specific subset of these instruments: longer-dated forecast contracts treated as futures and derivatives rather than gambling products. Interactive Brokers Canada was the first to receive approval in 2025. Wealthsimple followed with its own initial CIRO approval in March 2026.
Under this arrangement, Wealthsimple retains governance over which contracts get listed on the platform and enforces strict Know Your Customer requirements. All trades flow through Kalshi’s exchange, which is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the US. Wealthsimple has also committed to building educational tools directly into the app.
Kalshi’s growing footprint
For Kalshi, this partnership extends what has already been a breakout stretch. The New York-based company processed $17.9 billion in trading volume in May 2026 alone. It has raised $1 billion in funding at a $22 billion valuation.
What this means for Canadian investors
The most immediate implication is simple: Canadian self-directed investors now have a new tool for expressing views on macroeconomic outcomes across economic indicators, financial markets, and climate trends in a structured, regulated way.
The 30-day minimum settlement period filters out the rapid-fire trading that regulators worry about with short-term binary options. The exclusion of sports and election contracts signals that CIRO appears willing to greenlight prediction markets as financial tools, not as entertainment products — a narrower scope than what Kalshi offers in the US, where election contracts became a major draw during recent political cycles.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
English (US) · 