Gambling Stocks Surge as NFL-Spurred Online Betting Traffic Hits Record Highs in 2026
17 September 2026
The first NFL Sunday of the 2026 season produced 99.8 million geolocation checks across GeoComply's network and created 135,700 new sportsbook accounts, according to data from the company. That represents a 176% increase in geolocation checks compared to Aug. 30, the final Sunday before the NFL season began, when 36.2 million checks were recorded. The figures provide clear evidence that the start of the U.S. fall football season is once again driving a significant surge in regulated, online sports-betting activity, sending another wave of positive news into the gambling-stocks narrative.
Football isn't the only thing making the online-betting narrative stronger: prediction markets are adding a new growth element to the story. On Sept. 13, Aldrin Research noted that prediction markets generated more than $510.9 million in NFL trading volume on Sunday across seven of the 10 operators tracked. And after some stunning daily-volume records on the first weekend of the 2026 football season, that channel is now more clearly tied to the NFL and college sports than ever.
Kalshi accounted for more than 75% of that $510.9 million trading volume, dealing a back-to-back record weekends -- as "Parlay records push Kalshi to back-to-back records." That report explained the prediction-market surge this way: "The opportunity to bet on specific elements of individual or team performance never goes away, but major weekly occurrences like the NFL provide Kalshi with a giant platform to market its product." Polymarket reported a record weekend with more than $600 million in total volume, according to Nextevent Horizon.
A Court Ruling and a Legislative Proposal
Some coverage has attributed the appreciation that certain gambling stocks saw in early 2026 to passage of a new bipartisan Senate bill that has the potential to regulate prediction markets. That bill, the Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act, could fundamentally change the U.S. regulatory environment for prediction markets, says one April story. But recent coverage has put a different precedent up front. On Aug. 28, a federal appeals court ruled that the Federal Government did not have the power to regulate all sports contracts under the Commodity Exchange Act to a large extent, based on a lawsuit filed by DraftKings. That ruling, which centered around the definition of swaps, could make it easier for casinos to offer different kinds of sports-related proprietary contracts.
A New Narrative for 2026
The overall story is one of serious growth for online betting and, by extension, for gambling stocks and U.S. casinos: with companies now focused on retaining more customers through better online engagement, and with the result that gaming products are getting closer to retail users at a faster rate. Rush Street Interactive highlighted this trend in its Aug. 12 earnings release, which indicated record second-quarter performance for the company along with updated guidance for the full year. According to that release, Rush Street Interactive reported record Q2 revenue of $393.8 million, up 46% from the second quarter of 2025, and recording an EBITDA of $64.6 million, up 61%. And later Rush Street raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $1.56 billion to $1.60 billion, and its adjusted EBITDA guidance to $245 million to $265 million.
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Earlier in 2026, Codere Online reported a record quarterly net gaming revenue of €69.4 million, up 27% from the second quarter of 2025. But the trend wasn't limited to that company: Codere Online's report noted that the reason for the increase was specifically online growth. In 2025, Codere's total net gaming revenue represented €234.7 million, up 6% year over year. And Codere Online expects full-year net gaming revenue in 2026 to be in the range of €255 million to €265 million, with adjusted EBITDA in the range of €20 million to €25 million.
The equities of many casino and gaming companies have shown signs of resilience or outperformance in recent roundup coverage. In early March 2026, a gaming-stocks roundup said the Roundhill Sports Betting & iGaming ETF rose 2.4% during a rebound week. During its reporting period, the ETF's "total return for the last one year is 87.41%," according to that roundup. Another roundup in mid-August said the ETF was 3.7% up, with the S&P 500 rising by less than half a percent. In that roundup, the ETF is "up 71.69% this year, or almost 27 percentage points higher than the S&P 500. The 100-share sector ETF was down 0.4% and 1.02% in a two-week period, a 2.03% difference against the S&P 500, but the ETF had beat the S&P 500 by 4.56 percentage points after September 6 and 2.31 percentage points after September 7. Another report wrote: "Traditional casino stocks have held their ground in the face of a turbulent market, while benefiting from a windfall of well-received earnings reports. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) has fallen 1.40% over the past few weeks, while casino stocks, on average, have delivered a 1.49% gain."
The gaming industry's 2025 commercial gambling revenue growth speaks to the momentum in that sector: it was a record year, with iGaming up 28.3% and sports betting up 17.4% in the U.S. As for the future, the industry should continue to benefit from online sports-betting revenue growth in 2026. And major operators have not had a uniform response to these market conditions.
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