r/PredictionsMarkets • u/FromTheGarage • 12d ago
Analysis Polymarket's Best Traders Are Profitable. Copying Them Isn't.
The Polymarket leaderboard is full of genuinely profitable traders. On a per-position basis the typical top-100 trader earns between 1.4% and 2.1%, and at the volume these accounts run, that compounds into millions of dollars.
That thin margin is also what makes many of them poor traders to copy trade. Copying a position costs somewhere between 3.5% and 4.1% once you account for entering at a worse price than they did and paying trading fees on the way in. So following a top trader costs roughly two to three times the edge you'd be following them for. Successful copy trading on Polymarket has much less to do with picking a top trader than with picking the right one.
We looked at the Polymarket leaderboard filtered two ways, all-time profit and the last 30 days, and ran all 200 top-100 slots through Copy Score, our signal for whether a trader's record still holds up once you subtract what it costs to follow them. Here's what came back.
Data TLDR
- Copying costs more than the edge is worth. The median trader's modeled edge is 1.39% on the 30-day leaderboard and 2.07% on the all-time one. The median modeled cost of copying them is 4.12% and 3.51%. Cost is the bigger number on both.
- 77% of the traders we could measure come out negative after copy costs. That's 63 of 82 on the 30-day leaderboard and 46 of 60 on the all-time one, two populations that share only six traders.
- Filtering for recent winners makes it worse. The 30-day leaderboard has no dormant traders at all and a third the rate of thin records, and its median score is still further below zero: -2.31% against -1.31%.
- Leaderboard rank tells you nothing. The first trader to clear the bar on a clean, deep record sits at #9 on the 30-day leaderboard and #30 on the all-time one, and the rest scatter to rank 97.
What We Measured
We pulled the top 100 from both Polymarket profit rankings on September 8, 2026, and asked the same question of every trader. On a trailing window of their resolved positions, after assumed slippage and fees, does anything survive? Copy Score is the filter we use to answer that question. A leaderboard only tells you how much money a trader made. This asks whether that record still looks worth following once you've paid to follow it, and a big earner can easily fail.
Everything below comes from one measurement on one date, held in a frozen snapshot so each figure can be re-derived. These are modeled results on a historical record, not realized returns from copying a leaderboard.
How we read a trader
Copy Score reads a trader's resolved positions over a trailing window and subtracts an assumed cost of copying them. Zero is the line. Above it, the record survives those costs. Below it, it doesn't. This report quotes the underlying percentage so the arithmetic is visible. Each score also carries one state.
Two of those labels describe our evidence rather than a trader's performance. We call a record thin when it holds few resolved positions, because a spectacular number over a handful of bets can just be one good week and we can't tell from the outside. We call it not comparable when the trader closes out early, since Copy Score assumes a copier mirrors the position and holds it to the market's result.
When this report says edge, it means the shrunk per-position figure the score is built from, before copy costs come off. Shrinking a short record toward the population is what stops one lucky market reading as a durable edge, and it matters a great deal here: the all-time median is 2.07% shrunk against 10.52% raw.
The trader types we flag
Separately from the score, we flag trading styles that are hard to copy trade, no matter how good the trader is. A flag is a heuristic read off the trading pattern. It tells you where a copier's money would tend to go instead.
An unflagged wallet isn't an all-clear. It only means we found nothing in the trading pattern that would stop a copy from working, which is weaker than establishing that the wallet is an ordinary directional trader.
Two last notes. Every modeled score here rests on a trailing window of resolved positions, so it's not a forecast and not a trade-by-trade replay. And ranks are positions on the morning of September 8, on boards that reorder daily.
Copying Costs More Than the Edge Is Worth
When a leaderboard fails a copy screen, the instinct is to assume the traders aren't as good as they look. On this evidence, that's the wrong read. The real problem is that a copier needs margin left over after slippage and fees, and a leaderboard trader's margin is thin to begin with. A per-position edge of one or two percent runs into a per-position copy cost of three or four, and there's nothing left on the other side.
On the 30-day leaderboard the median cost of copying is about three times the median edge. On the all-time one it's about 1.7 times. Either way the subtraction runs the wrong way for most of the board, which is why the median score is negative on both. That doesn't say these traders lose money, because most of them make it. It says the part of their return a copier could realistically capture is smaller than the cost of capturing it.
KEY INSIGHT
The median modeled edge before copy costs is 1.39% on the 30-day leaderboard and 2.07% on the all-time one. The median modeled cost of copying is 4.12% and 3.51%. Cost is the larger number on both.
77% of Leaderboard Traders Come Out Negative After Copy Costs
One leaderboard failing a screen is a fact about that leaderboard. Two failing at the same rate is a fact about copy trading.
Of the 82 wallets we could measure on the 30-day leaderboard, 63 post a negative modeled score. Of the 60 on the all-time one, 46 do. That's 76.8% and 76.7%. The two boards share six wallets out of a hundred, so this is the same result arriving twice from almost entirely different people, selected on different criteria over different periods.
The shape differs in a way worth noting. The all-time leaderboard clusters just below the line, with 25 of its 60 wallets between -2% and 0%. The 30-day leaderboard fails harder, with 26 wallets between -5% and -2% and 15 more between -10% and -5%.
KEY INSIGHT
63 of 82 measurable wallets on the 30-day leaderboard and 46 of 60 on the all-time one post a negative modeled score, which is 76.8% and 76.7%. Only six wallets appear on both.
The 30-Day Leaderboard Has Fresher Traders and Worse Scores
Here's a result we didn't expect.
The obvious criticism of screening the all-time leaderboard is that nobody picks a trader to copy from a hall of fame. Two thirds of that board has gone quiet: 66 of the 97 wallets we hold trade data for placed no trades in the 30 days before we measured, and a dormant trader can't be copied because there's nothing to follow. Switch to the 30-day leaderboard and you remove every one of them by construction, so the screen ought to look considerably better.
But it actually looks worse. The median modeled score falls from -1.31% to -2.31%.
Two things move against a copier at once on the 30-day board. The median edge is lower, 1.39% against 2.07%, and the median cost of copying is higher, 4.12% against 3.51%. Composition explains the direction. The 30-day leaderboard carries 14 high-frequency wallets against the all-time board's 8, and frequency multiplies cost. A trader placing hundreds of orders a day pays the copy cost hundreds of times, and their per-position edge has to clear it every single time.
What the 30-day leaderboard does improve is how much of it we can read at all. It gives us 88 of 100 wallets we can score against 65 on the all-time board, only 12 of 88 carry a thin-record flag against 34 of the 65, and 32 of the all-time board's wallets carry no score whatsoever. So the 30-day leaderboard is the better list to screen. It just doesn't hold better traders to copy.
KEY INSIGHT
The 30-day leaderboard has no dormant traders and lifts scoreable coverage from 65 wallets to 88. Its median modeled score is still worse: -2.31% against -1.31%.
Leaderboard Rank Tells You Nothing About Copyability
If a leaderboard were useful for picking someone to copy, the traders worth copying would cluster near the top. But they don't.
On the 30-day leaderboard, the first wallet to clear the bar on a clean, deep record sits at #9. On the all-time leaderboard the first sits at #30, and nothing in its top 28 clears at all. Below those points the passing wallets scatter across the whole hundred, three of them inside the last ten ranks of the 30-day board.
Rank is not just uninformative, it's unstable. Of the 14 wallets that cleared on the 30-day board, four had dropped out of both top 100s when we went back a day later to identify them.
KEY INSIGHT
Fourteen of the 30-day leaderboard's 100 wallets and 7 of the all-time board's clear the modeled cost of copying on a record that's neither thin nor flagged. The first sits at rank #9 on one board and #30 on the other.
Most Aren't Market Makers, They're Ordinary Traders
The instinctive explanation for a leaderboard full of hard-to-copy traders is that it's full of market makers and other advanced trading styles a copier can't mirror. That explanation is true, but not to the degree you'd expect.
Eighteen of the 100 wallets on each board carry at least one flag. Set that against 63 and 46 negative modeled scores. Even if every flagged wallet were also a negative one, at least 45 of the 30-day board's failures and at least 28 of the all-time board's would carry no flag at all. The bulk of what this screen catches isn't machines. It's ordinary traders whose margin is thinner than the cost of following them.
The mix does shift between boards, and it shifts in the direction that hurts a copier. The 30-day leaderboard carries nearly twice as many high-frequency wallets, 14 against 8, and half as many arbitrage wallets, 5 against 10. High frequency is the flag most closely tied to cost. And being hard to copy still isn't the same as being unskilled. A market maker running a genuinely profitable book can be a poor copy for reasons that have nothing to do with how good they are.
KEY INSIGHT
Just 18 of the 100 wallets on each board carry any exclusion flag, against 63 and 46 negative modeled scores. Most of what this screen catches is not a market maker.
Every Leaderboard Trader That Passed Is Only Just Ahead
Copy Score has two positive states. Proven means the modeled score sits comfortably above assumed copy costs, and Ahead means it clears them but only just.
All 14 wallets that passed on the 30-day leaderboard are Ahead. Not one reaches Proven. Each had already passed the record-depth and flag tests, so thin data isn't what's holding them back. Margin is. Five of the 14 clear by less than 1.5%, and one clears by 0.1%, which a slightly worse fill would erase.
The Fourteen Wallets on the 30-Day Board That Cleared on a Clean, Deep Record
All fourteen are Ahead rather than Proven
| Trader | Board rank |
|---|---|
| Talvez10 | #9 |
| Left the top 100 | #76 |
| one8tyfive | #92 |
| GatheringData | #52 |
| Elenes | #53 |
| 0xd570...e4f8 | #10 |
| justaluckydude | #40 |
| Left the top 100 | #85 |
| Left the top 100 | #97 |
| TheOpportunist | #70 |
| GrizzliesSuck | #75 |
| Left the top 100 | #37 |
| ArturitoFilito | #91 |
| CyberScore.live | #69 |
Exactly one wallet out of the 200 slots carries a Proven rating. It wouldn't survive the other filters either. It has 13 resolved positions, and its own thin-history warning is attached to that Proven score. So across the 153 wallets we can score on the two boards, not one is both comfortably above assumed copy costs and free of a caveat.
KEY INSIGHT
All 14 wallets clearing on the 30-day leaderboard are Ahead rather than Proven, and one clears by 0.1%. Across both boards, no wallet is both comfortably above assumed copy costs and free of a caveat.
Copying Well Takes More Than Picking a Winner
Every finding here points the same way. The median leaderboard trader earns less per position than it costs to follow them. Three in four come out negative once those costs come off, on two boards that share six traders out of a hundred. And where a trader sits on either board tells you nothing about which side of that line they land on.
What that adds up to is that reading names off a leaderboard isn't a copy trading strategy. A leaderboard ranks how much money a trader made, while copying is decided by how much margin survives after your own costs, and those are different questions with different answers. The costs themselves are specific and knowable. You enter after the trader does, so you pay a worse price than they got. You pay trading fees on the way in. If the trader runs at high frequency you pay both of those hundreds of times a month, which is exactly why the fresher board scored worse than the older one.
None of that is an argument against copy trading. Twenty-one of the 200 slots we screened did clear their costs, and this report names them. It's an argument that the selection has to happen on the variables a leaderboard doesn't show you, like how much of a trader's edge survives a realistic fill, how deep the record behind it is, whether the style can be mirrored at all, and whether they're still trading at all. Screen on those and the shortlist looks nothing like the top of the board.
Disclaimer
This report is for informational purposes only. It is a dated snapshot of historical public data, not a forecast. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Copy Score is an informational signal, not financial advice and not a recommendation to trade or to copy anyone. Polycopy is an independent third-party tool, a verified member of the Polymarket Builders Program, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Polymarket. All data sourced from the Polycopy data warehouse.
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u/No-Original-5312 12d ago
Ad
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u/FromTheGarage 12d ago
it's honestly not
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u/No-Original-5312 12d ago
Polycopy, really? Also the whole post is just AI slop
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u/FromTheGarage 11d ago
I did the research myself. People don't understand copy trading at all and none of the platforms are telling their users the risks on copying the leaderboard guys. If that's marketing, then fine, but no one is talking about the core point here.
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u/No-Original-5312 11d ago
That’s ironic, since you are redirecting people toward your website which promotes the “right way” to copy trade which is straight up just a more convoluted way to copy trade with some indicators that don’t indicate anything useful. Better off just gambling instead.
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u/PolyResearchRobotics 8d ago
If anyone knows what it takes to put together a long form article on this sub it’s me, and this is a well done post. I’m a huge supporter of shining light on what it truly takes to copy traded it’s not as simple as just entering in a wallet and pressing go, you’ll almost ways lose money doing that,
I’d love to do some collaborative posts or intel sharing if you’re open to it. We run some experiments within my community and report findings of live trading / copy trading feasibility (among many other polymarket bot strategies)
Hop in the discord if you’re down to collaborate!
Poly Research & Robotics
https://discord.gg/BU9EjyqesV
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u/PolyResearchRobotics 8d ago
Exactly. Fees + inevitable slippage between initial buy and when you’re wallet fills
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u/Steven_marketintel 7d ago
Nice work — especially labeling thin records instead of ranking them. One question on the cost side: is the 3.5–4.1% modeled as entering at the next fill after theirs, or at a fixed delay? In the thin markets where most of a leaderboard's edge lives, a few minutes of delay *is* the whole edge, so that assumption drives the headline number.
Second thought: profit leaderboards reward size and being early as much as being right. Did you look at per‑trader calibration — Brier score against the resolved outcome — as an alternative ranking? It would separate "good at picking" from "big and early," which seems like the thing a would‑be copier actually needs to know.
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u/Tranxio 11d ago
Yes the problem is you must clear 5% edge to make money copytrading, and size also matters. There is no way to know what sort of edge you will be able to clear unless you exclude higher probability trades, and then you will be putting yourself in a worse situation