Key Points
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The real money might not be in the prediction platforms themselves, but in the companies selling the data, infrastructure, and trading rails that institutional investors rely on.
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Prediction market plays offer both stability and high-upside speculation, depending on your risk tolerance.
- 10 stocks we like better than DraftKings ›
Prediction markets have ballooned from a niche corner of finance into a $63.5 billion trading volume phenomenon in 2025 alone, a fourfold increase from the prior year. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are actively capturing headlines and market share, but neither is publicly traded… yet.
If you want to ride this wave through the stock market, the real opportunities are hiding in plain sight, and one of them costs barely more than a dollar.
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1. Intercontinental Exchange
When Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced a $2 billion investment in Polymarket last October, most headlines focused on how the deal catapulted Shayne Coplan, the company’s 27-year-old founder and CEO, into the ranks of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
While I was happy (and admittedly a little jealous) for Coplan, what struck me more was the signal behind the deal: ICE was basically declaring prediction-market data a new institutional asset class.
The investment valued Polymarket at roughly $9 billion and granted ICE exclusive rights to distribute its event-driven data to institutional capital markets.
Then, in February, ICE launched its Polymarket Signals and Sentiment tool, which converts crowd-sourced prediction market probabilities into structured analytics that trading desks can layer on top of traditional data feeds.
Think about that for a moment. When a major regulatory decision is pending in Washington, NYSE traders don’t have to wait for the news to break anymore; they can watch the Polymarket odds shift in real time.
ICE is effectively building a new “sentiment overlay” for the entire financial system. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has called prediction markets “super interesting” and confirmed a team is evaluating them.
ICE is the company most likely to sell them the data, and I think it’s a very safe bet this year and beyond.
2. DraftKings
DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) stock has been slaughtered, down over 45% in the past year. But here’s the part the market hasn’t fully processed: DraftKings Predictions already reaches 38 states, compared to just 26 for its core sportsbook. That means DraftKings has unlocked access to massive markets like California and Texas through federally regulated event contracts, markets where traditional sports betting remains illegal.
CEO Jason Robins has said that Predictions could represent a $10 billion annual gross revenue opportunity and is targeting “hundreds of millions in annual revenue” in the near term.
DraftKings is building two distinct revenue engines here: transaction fees from the customer-facing platform and trading economics from an in-house market-making division it’s launching in 2026.
But what I find particularly appealing about this ticker is that the company acquired Railbird, a designated contract market, and plans to mix it into the company by midyear to gain a larger share of the technology stack.
Also, on Super Bowl Sunday, DraftKings Predictions had the second-most downloads in its category and delivered 3x its prior daily trading volume record. With the stock near 52-week lows, the risk-reward looks compelling for patient investors.
3. FiscalNote
This tech stock is the pick that nobody’s talking about, and I get why. FiscalNote‘s market cap has cratered to roughly $17 million. But the company just announced a major expansion into political prediction markets in February 2026, launching a preview at PoliticalPredictions.com.
Here’s what makes the stock interesting to me. FiscalNote has spent over a decade building legislative-tracking, regulatory-monitoring, and policy-analytics tools used by corporations, trade associations, and even government agencies. Basically, it already models political and regulatory outcomes, so I think that prediction markets are just a natural extension of its core DNA.
CEO Josh Resnik described the move as “an evolution of what we’ve been doing for years,” positioning FiscalNote to bring proprietary policy data sets and AI capabilities into a category that institutional players are increasingly taking seriously.
The company is exploring models in which advocacy organizations could sponsor prediction markets tied to policy issues, creating entirely new revenue streams.
With a price-to-sales ratio of just 0.13, this is a speculative and riskier play in my opinion. It’s also the kind of asymmetric bet that can define a portfolio if the prediction market category truly takes off.
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FiscalNote is a transcription service used by The Motley Fool. Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Goldman Sachs Group. The Motley Fool recommends Intercontinental Exchange. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
