Your Kalshi balance tells you what's in the account today. It doesn't tell you whether your trading is working: deposits and withdrawals move it too, open positions are still in play, and fees come out of every trade. To know how you're really doing you need your profit and loss: what you got back, minus what you paid, across every finished trade.
Why it's harder than it looks
- Trades finish in two ways. A position can settle (paying $1 or nothing per contract) or be sold early at whatever the market pays. Both count.
- Partial sales. Buy 100 contracts, sell 40 at one price and 60 later at another, and the trade has two results, not one.
- Fees. Small per trade, but they add up across hundreds of trades, and a P&L without them flatters you.
- Open versus finished. Open positions have a paper value that moves with the market (unrealized P&L). Only finished trades are money actually made or lost (realized P&L). Keep the two apart.
- More than one platform. If you also trade on Polymarket, half your record lives somewhere else.
1Kalshi's own app
The Kalshi app is built for trading, and it shows your open positions and balance well. It's the right place to check a position right now. Adding up months of finished trades into one honest total isn't its focus.
Good for: open positions today. Misses: a running total of what your trading has made.
2Kalshi's P&L statement
Kalshi publishes a yearly profit-and-loss statement for your account. To find it: log in on the website, open Account → Tax Info, choose the year and download the P&L statement. According to Kalshi's help center:
- It includes fees and any rebates.
- It uses first-in, first-out (FIFO) accounting to work out each result.
- It's updated monthly, on the first morning of each month, so a mid-month look won't include your latest trades.
Good for: the official yearly figure, and your records at tax time. Misses: anything from this month, and any breakdown of where the result came from.
3A spreadsheet
The do-it-yourself route. One row per trade, with these columns:
| Column | Example |
|---|---|
| Date opened | Sep 14 |
| Market | Fed cuts rates in December |
| Side | Yes |
| Contracts | 50 |
| Price paid (per contract) | $0.62 |
| Fees | $0.83 |
| Result per contract | $1.00 (settled Yes), $0 (settled No) or the sale price |
| P&L | = contracts × (result − price paid) − fees |
In the example, a settled Yes gives 50 × ($1.00 − $0.62) − $0.83 = $18.17. A settled No gives 50 × ($0 − $0.62) − $0.83 = −$31.83. Use the price of the side you actually bought: a No bought at 38¢ is a 38¢ position, not a 62¢ one.
Good for: full control, and categories of your own. Misses: anything you forget to enter. It's accurate only as long as you never skip a trade, and partial sales make it fiddly fast.
4A tracker app
A tracker reads your trades from the exchange, so nothing depends on your memory. Kesin is one, built for Kalshi and Polymarket together (we make it, so weigh this section accordingly). What it does:
- Open positions with live P&L, marked to current market prices, on both platforms in one book.
- Your finished trades imported from the exchange record, so sold-early and settled trades and partial sales are all counted.
- Leaks: plain-English findings, from your own finished trades, on where your money actually goes.
The honest fine print: Kalshi is connected with a read-only API key (Kesin refuses a key that can trade); you can disconnect at any time, which deletes it. A free account gets one sync and one import of finished bets per exchange; keeping them up to date is part of Premium; logging bets is free, by searching for a market or pasting its link. Kesin's figures are a tracker's view of your trading, not a tax statement: for that, use Kalshi's statement above.
See your real P&L across Kalshi and Polymarket.
Free on the App Store, with an optional Premium plan.
What to look at once you have the numbers
- Realized P&L over a long stretch. A week proves nothing; a few hundred trades starts to say something.
- Win rate together with price. Winning 80% of the time sounds great until you notice you paid 85¢ for each one. A win at 90¢ earns 10¢; a loss costs 90¢.
- Results by category. Most people are better at some kinds of markets than others, and rarely the ones they'd guess.
- Fees as a share of profit. If fees eat a big slice of what you make, trading less often, or placing limit orders where makers pay less, may matter more than any single prediction.
More guides
Sources
- Kalshi Help Center, What tax documentation does Kalshi provide? (June 2026) and Trading History.
- The spreadsheet example uses made-up numbers to show the arithmetic.