DraftKings holds its NFL market share lead as prediction unit grows

Jason Robins stood at a Wells Fargo conference on Tuesday and said something that should make the rest of the prediction market industry uncomfortable: DraftKings wins either way. If sports event contracts survive the legal challenges working through federal courts, his prediction unit keeps compounding. If they don't, his licensed sportsbook — already running 15 percent ahead of last year's NFL handle in the first two weeks of the season — absorbs the volume.

That is not a hedge. That is a structural position most of his competitors cannot replicate.

The 15 percent handle figure covers only traditional sportsbook operations. Robins was careful to separate it from DraftKings Predictions, which he described separately as a growth business that has expanded volume by roughly two and a half times since July. Some of that summer acceleration came from World Cup activity. Some of it is something else — a broader shift in how a certain kind of user wants to engage with sports outcomes, one that looks less like gambling and more like trading, at least to the user.

Robins said the company holds close to a double-digit share of the broader sports prediction market, higher in NFL specifically, and offers roughly three times as many NFL markets as its nearest competitor. That depth matters more than it sounds. In fixed income, the dealer who makes the most markets sets the price everyone else references. The same dynamic is beginning to appear here: platforms with the most contracts attract the informed flow, which improves their pricing, which attracts more flow.

The legal environment around sports event contracts is deteriorating in a way the Wells Fargo audience probably underweights. Missouri's attorney general has now named six platforms in cease-and-desist orders, and recent federal appellate decisions have found that sports event contracts don't qualify as swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act — which is the jurisdictional argument the CFTC-regulated platforms were counting on to preempt state gambling laws. DraftKings, as a licensed sportsbook in Missouri and most other states, sits behind a regulatory wall that its prediction-market-only competitors cannot climb quickly.

Robins acknowledged that DraftKings still has gaps — tennis and smaller sports where the company is concentrating less effort — but framed those as choices, not limitations. The $1 billion adjusted EBITDA target for 2026 appears intact, with 2027 expected to improve materially.

Here is where I part from the consensus read: most of the coverage treats the prediction market volume growth as the story. I think the sportsbook handle is the more important number. A two-and-a-half-times volume increase on a product launched in December 2025 is exactly what you'd expect in the first year of a new offering with a major sporting event catalyst. The NFL handle growth is what tells you whether the core business is healthy enough to fund the expansion. It is. That changes the risk profile of the prediction market regulatory exposure considerably — DraftKings can absorb a partial shutdown in a way that Kalshi or Polymarket, operating without licensed sportsbook infrastructure, cannot.