Chicken Route

How to play Chicken Route

The first was direct marketing (emails, texts, push notifications). Citing randomised studies, the committee noted that limiting direct marketing resulted in reduced betting and fewer short-term harms. 

Referencing an Australian study on direct marketing and its link to gambling harms, Dr Philip Newall, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol noted that “causality was established by getting a random subset of participants to opt-out of receiving direct marketing offers”.

It was found that “this group then self-reported significantly lower expenditure and harms [ … ] over the next two weeks”.  

What is Chicken Route?

Sahil Patel, founder of competitive intelligence provider Aldrin AI, said those relationships help explain Kalshi’s position.

“A lot of market makers want to go where there’s liquidity,” he said, adding that platform stability and Kalshi’s investment in the financial side of its market-maker relationships were also important. “I think Kalshi is a freight train that’s just kind of running away with it.”

Aldrin monitors product changes, advertising, social media activity, app-store rankings and trading volume across prediction market operators. Patel said the objective is to connect those indicators and show how a product launch supported by advertising affects volume and market share.

How to play Chicken Route

For the gaming industry, the marked economic shift over the course of 2026 and a return to an elevated interest-rate environment after years of post-Covid easing could dissipate some of the optimism that prevailed at the onset of this year.

Many top gaming stocks have underperformed relative to the broader market in recent years, and most of the M&A activity has been facilitated by private equity and other institutions that can more readily capitalise on depressed valuations. There had been hope that rates would start to fall and help alleviate those pressures.

“Publicly traded valuations are a reflection of the current interest rate environment,” Chad Beynon, lead gaming analyst for Macquarie, told iGB. “Whether it’s a long-term financial model on a growth company, you’re going to discount that back at a higher rate, or if it’s just a standard four-wall business, the cash flows in a higher interest rate environment are worth less.”