Maker and taker

Also called liquidity provider · aggressor

A maker posts a resting order and waits to be filled; a taker crosses the spread and fills immediately.

The distinction shows up in two places: what you pay, and what your trade reveals.

On cost, Kalshi's trading fee is a taker charge, so an order that rests and is filled by someone else crossing to you avoids it. That is why the sizing calculator carries a maker toggle — it reruns the identical math without the taker fee while staying on the Kalshi schedule, so you can see whether a marginal trade only works as a maker. The trade-off is stated rather than hidden: a resting order may never fill at all, and the ones that do fill are selected against you.

On information, the taker is the aggressor — the party who wanted the trade badly enough to pay the spread for it. Kalshi tags the taker side of every print on its public tape, and that tag is the input every Kalshi flow signal on this site reads. It is the closest thing to intent that anonymous data supports: you can see which side was impatient, and how much it paid to be. You cannot see who was impatient, because Kalshi publishes no per-user data at all.

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Definitions describe how Polymarket and Kalshi behave and how WhaleTracks models them; venue rules and fee schedules can change, so confirm anything you size a position on with the venue itself. WhaleTracks is informational analytics, not financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results.