What actually settles the contract.

Every Kalshi market carries its own rules: what is being measured, which source reports it, how it is read, when the measurement is taken, and what happens if the source fails to report. Those rules, not the market's title, decide who gets paid. The title is a summary written for humans; the rules are the contract.

This sounds pedantic until the first time it costs money. Two markets with nearly identical titles can settle on different sources, at different times, with different rounding — and the one you did not read is the one that settles against you. Reading the rules before entering is the single cheapest habit available on the exchange.

The source disagrees with the world. A statistic gets revised, a preliminary print differs from the final, an official body publishes something the news reported differently. The contract follows its source.

The definition is narrower than the phrase. “Recession”, “landfall”, “announced” and “confirmed” all have ordinary meanings and a specific one written into the rules. Only the specific one settles anything.

The timing is not what you assumed. Measurements are taken at a stated moment. An event that happens the following day, or a report released after the deadline, is outside the window however clearly it happened.

The source goes quiet. Rules specify what occurs when data does not arrive — a fallback source, a postponement, or a defined resolution. That branch is easy to skip when reading and occasionally the one that governs.

Traders have a word for losing this way — rulescucked, defined with the rest of the vocabulary in the slang guide — and its existence tells you the risk is well known. On heavily traded markets some of it is in the price already: a contract on an ambiguous question trades a little below where the underlying probability alone would put it, because participants are discounting the wording risk.

What is not priced is the part specific to you: whether you read the rules. The market's discount reflects the average participant's understanding. A trader who skipped the rules page is holding a different, worse contract than the one the price describes, and there is no discount for that.

A position does not have to be held to resolution. Selling before settlement converts an uncertain outcome into a certain price, which is often the point — but it is another trade, with another fee and another spread to cross, computed at the price you exit rather than the one you entered. The break-even guide covers what the round trip costs.

Liquidity is also not guaranteed to be there when you want it. Books thin out as a market approaches resolution and opinion converges, so the moment you most want to exit an uncertain position can be the moment the spread is widest.