Kalshi Targets Tesla, Nvidia With U.S. Stock Perpetuals

A Tesla contract that keeps trading after Nasdaq closes would give U.S. retail investors a new way to take leveraged positions on individual companies, if Kalshi can clear a regulatory dispute over who should oversee the products.

The New York-based prediction-market operator plans to seek approval for roughly 60 perpetual futures tied to stocks and exchange-traded funds, including Tesla, Apple and Nvidia, according to Bloomberg and CoinDesk reports. Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour said the company could file as soon as the week of September 14, asking the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission to jointly regulate the contracts as security futures.

Perpetual futures, or perps, have no expiration date. Traders can use them to speculate on whether an asset will rise or fall, often with leverage, while periodic payments help keep the contract aligned with the underlying price. The structure dominates crypto derivatives but remains largely untested for U.S. equities.

Kalshi says its initial stock contracts would trade 23 hours a day, five days a week. Each contract would represent 100 shares, with minimum margin set at 15% of the stock’s current market value, Mansour told Bloomberg. The company plans to focus first on stocks with at least $100 billion in market capitalization and $450 million in average daily trading volume.

That schedule would create a price discovery venue outside regular equity hours. It would also create a surveillance headache. Citadel Securities has warned that equity-linked perps operating outside SEC oversight could become a “parallel shadow market,” where insider trading, trading halts and cross-market manipulation are harder to monitor, CoinDesk reported.

Kalshi is extending the same product architecture into commodities. Mansour said the company wants to add agricultural contracts and has been pursuing a West Texas Intermediate-linked perpetual futures contract. The platform launched 24/7 gold and silver perps on September 10, describing them as the first U.S. commodity perpetuals regulated by the CFTC.

The push puts Kalshi closer to CME Group, which has challenged the regulator’s treatment of perpetual futures in court and argued that the products receive an overly favorable regulatory classification. It also tests whether a venue built around event contracts can become a broader derivatives exchange without importing crypto’s leverage risks into mainstream markets.