About this app
What is Jugglenaut?
Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.
One interesting nugget surrounds weekend figures at Kalshi, where volume on Sunday only surpassed prior daily activity by $34 million, BofA data shows. Typically, Sunday volume for the quarter dwarfs that of College Football Saturdays due to the voracious demand for NFL offerings. BofA analyst Shaun Kelley attributes the irregularity to the possibility that Kalshi is “over indexing” on college sports.
Kelley also cited improvements at Robinhood as a possible factor for the regression at Kalshi. Just before the NFL season, Robinhood took a minority stake in Crypto.com and struck a deal to begin routing NFL contracts to OG.com, the site’s regulated prediction market platform.
What is Jugglenaut?
Other than Station, Las Vegas Sands had been the other largest non-union holdout in Las Vegas for many years. But when the Venetian-Palazzo was sold to Apollo Global Management in 2021, the firm had no issues with Culinary and ratified the property’s first-ever deal with the union in 2024.
The animosity between the sides has become political over the years. Station is owned and operated by the Fertitta family, who have been prominent Republican donors for many years. Culinary is a largely Democratic organisation that typically supports and endorses left-leaning candidates.
Last month, US President Donald Trump made an impromptu visit to Las Vegas, hosting a rally at Red Rock. Trump called the Fertittas a “beautiful family” during his remarks. Culinary, meanwhile, denounced the event and the Fertittas’ support of Trump and Nevada’s Republican Governor Joe Lombardo.
How to play Jugglenaut
Takers is a prediction market industry colloquialism for the market participants that swiftly fill buy and sell orders, thus removing liquidity from the marketplace. Conversely, makers are the market participants viewed as liquidity providers and professional or sharp money.
“Recent launches, including customizable same-game parlays (SGPs), further support our view that Prediction Markets (PM) are increasingly converging with traditional sportsbooks,” observes Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon. “As a result, we now estimate total US PM taker volume to reach $190 billion in 2026E (vs $169 billion prior).”
If the research firm’s $190 billion taker volume estimate proves accurate, it’d represent a more than eightfold increase from the $22 billion taker turnover seen last year.
