How to read a trader before following them

Profit tells you about size, not skill

Polymarket's leaderboard sorts by profit. A wallet with $3M of profit on $200M of volume made 1.5% per dollar; a wallet with $30k on $200k made 15%. The second one is the better trader and the easier one to copy.

Months in profit

One good month happens to everyone. Twelve positive months out of fourteen does not. Our score weighs consistency first and cuts the score of wallets with under eight months of history by up to 70%, because a lucky quarter looks identical to skill until it does not.

Win rate on a fair sample

Careful: Polymarket's API returns closed positions sorted by profit, so any truncated list looks like a wall of wins. We compute win rate on the most recent 1,000 closed markets, and we say so on every wallet page. The median across our 650 profiled wallets is 66%, the 90th percentile 88%. A profile claiming 100% on hundreds of markets is a sampling artefact.

Holding time decides whether copying works

We copied leaderboard wallets on paper with a 60-second delay. Sports books moved 7 cents per dollar against us in that minute; event markets 2.7 cents. A trader who holds for weeks can be followed by a human. A trader who bets $8 on obscure football 200 times a day cannot.

The forward test

Everything above is history. Our Proof page freezes the top 20 every Monday and only counts what they earn afterwards. If our ranking is good, it shows there. If it is not, it shows there too.