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Here are some core terminologies used in Kalshi exchange: Category: A high-level discovery grouping for related series, such as sports, crypto, or weather. Each series has a primary category and a list of discovery categories, categories. Use Get Series List with the category filter to browse series in a category; the filter matches any of a series’ categories. Subcategory: A narrower discovery grouping within a category. A series can belong to multiple subcategories. In API filters, subcategories are often represented as tags; use Get Tags for Series Categories to discover tags grouped by category. Market: A single binary market. This is a low level object which rarely will need to be exposed on its own to members. The usage of the term “market” here is consistent with how it’s used in the backend and API. Event: An event is a collection of markets and the basic unit that members should interact with on Kalshi. Series: A series is a collection of related events. The following should hold true for events that make up a series:
  • Each event should look at similar data for determination, but translated over another, disjoint time period.
  • Series should never have a logical outcome dependency between events.
  • Events in a series should have the same ticker prefix.

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How the Objects Fit Together

The series is the top-level object. Each event belongs to exactly one series (series_ticker), and each market belongs to exactly one event (event_ticker). Categories and subcategories are not levels above the series. They are fields on the series, used for discovery:
  • category is the series’ primary category. Each series has exactly one.
  • categories lists every category the series appears under. The category filter on Get Series List matches against this list.
  • tags lists the series’ subcategories. The tags filter on Get Series List matches against this list. A series’ tags can come from more than one of its categories.
Get Tags for Series Categories returns the category-to-tag map, built from series that currently have open markets. For example, the monthly US gas price series has Economics as its primary category and also appears under Commodities. Its Oil and energy tag is an Economics subcategory and its Oil & Gas tag is a Commodities subcategory. The series has one event per month, and each event has one market per price strike:

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Ticker Conventions

Categories and subcategories help organize and filter series, but they are not part of the ticker convention. Tickers often follow Series -> Event -> Market: for example, the KXHIGHNY series may have an event like KXHIGHNY-24JAN01, and that event may have a market like KXHIGHNY-24JAN01-T60. There are occasional exceptions, so do not parse ticker strings to infer relationships. Best practice is to use the series, event, market, and search endpoints and rely on fields like series_ticker, event_ticker, category, and tags.
Please see the “Timeline and Payout” dropdown on a market’s page to find the Market, Event, and Series tickers. Note that the market ticker will depend on which market you are looking at on that page. For example, Trump and Harris are each their own market.