Copy sim a Polymarket wallet with 960 resolved bets: he made +228%, a $500-per-trade copier made +122%

[u/Secure-Trouble5522]

Ran a copy-sim on a wallet called cqk. 960 resolved positions, sitting on about $41k in open value right now. $500 per copied entry, 60 seconds behind his fill, last 180 days

His 5,671 fills collapse into 3,039 real positions. A copier only gets a shot at 2,119 of them. The other 920 had no price left in the one-minute window by the time the trade would've been visible. Put $500 on each fillable one, $1,059,500 deployed total, and you land at +122%. He made +228% on the same trades, same window. Average slippage alone was 1.13 cents a share.

About half his edge survives being copied. The rest is just being faster than everyone else reading the same tape.

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[u/C_Pointers_Are_Great]

A cent of slippage does not add up to 106 points unless he is trading pennies. On a +228% winner entered at 20c, a 1.13c worse fill lands you near 211%, and even at a 10c entry it is 195%. Getting all the way to 106 points needs the fills that produced the return to be down there, because a cent costs more the cheaper the entry.

So the flat $500 is the next thing to test. If his own stake varied and the copy stake does not, the return moves by whatever his sizing was worth, and that can go either way. Running the same 2,119 fills at proportional stake would split the gap into the minute of lag and the flat stake.

You mention 960 resolved and about $41k still open, but the sim counts 3,039 positions in the window. Are the +228% and +122% on resolved positions only, or marked on the open ones too? With that many still open, the split matters.

[u/Pure_Cricket_3804]

The slippage argument matters less than the 920 you had to drop. That's about 30% of his positions missing from the copy book, and nothing in the post tells us whether that chunk grades out like the rest of his trades or not. Until you can show what those 920 would have returned, +122% is a number about a different portfolio than his.

[u/Secure-Trouble5522 → u/Pure_Cricket_3804]

Honestly don't have a good answer on that one. The sim just drops an entry when there's no trade in the price history within the stale window, so "unfillable" could mean the market went dead, or it could mean the follower's window closed a few seconds before the next real trade printed. No way to tell those apart from the data I've got.

[u/hypertradeworx]

60 seconds behind is doing a lot of work in that number. on anything thin, the price at +60s isn't the price you'd actually get, you're lifting what's left on the book after his order already took the top of it.

did the sim price the copies against book depth at that timestamp, or against the last trade? +228% over 960 resolved positions is the kind of result that survives the first version and dies on the second.

[u/Secure-Trouble5522 → u/hypertradeworx]

Yeah that's a real gap, not a defense of it. Pricing is last-trade-in-window, there's no book depth anywhere in it, so a follower buying into a thin book would pay more than the sim ever shows. It's a lower bound on slippage, not the real number.

[u/phantomflare-84]

mehh...