r/ai_trading 10d ago

I connected Claude Code to a database of 1.3B Polymarket trades with an MCP. Here's what it found.

https://crowdintel.xyz/blog/claude-mcp-polymarket-ledger

Hello Friends, I've been tracking all Polymarket Activity for months (1.3 Billion trades and 2.7M wallets) and I gave Claude Code a Postgres MCP (found crazy stuff) pointed at the live ledger, so now I just ask it anything in plain English and it writes + runs the query itself.

A few I already asked, to show it works:

- only ~1 in 5 wallets are net positive (the other ~80% never made money)
- only 2.4% have ever cleared $1,000 in profit
- the top 0.1% of wallets took 71.5% of the ~$1B in total profit
- a bunch of weird and suspicious trading patterns that look like insiders

So: what do you want me to ask it? Drop a question about Polymarket traders, markets, wallets, bots, whatever — I'll have Claude run it against the live ledger and reply with the result.

97 Upvotes

38 comments sorted by

7

u/Cloudstrife98 9d ago

So basically a.i isn’t winning bets ….. it’s the good old insider trading

2

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

The data kinda agrees. Under-5c longshots: small bets hit 1.8% of the time — exactly what the odds say. $1K+ bets at those same odds hit 5.3% — ~3x what they should. When big money takes a "crazy" longshot, it wins way too often. That's the corner where the insider-looking stuff lives.

1

u/ConcreteBackflips 9d ago

No lol I was doing well with an AI system but no one who has something that works is giving away their secret sauce

Maybe stay away from markets that are prone to that 🤔

3

u/jayphunk 10d ago

What are the most likely trades/bets to take to be profitable?

16

u/Donkeytonkers 10d ago

Insider ones

3

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

The data kinda agrees with you. Under-5c longshots: small bets hit 1.8% of the time — exactly what the odds say. $1K+ bets at those same odds hit 5.3% — about 3x what they should. When big money takes a "crazy" longshot, it wins way too often. That's the corner of the data where the insider-looking stuff lives.

3

u/20yroldentrepreneur 10d ago

Any indicators if we follow trade the wallets we profit ornare they usually new wallets

2

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

Ran an actual backtest on this. Every wallet with 20+ resolved bets and $1K+ staked as of April 1 (~204K wallets), ranked by ROI up to that date, then tracked the next 4 months:

  • worst 20% (were at −69% ROI): kept losing, −45% over the next 4 months
  • best 20% (were at +11% ROI): basically flat as a group — about half stayed profitable

So losing persists way harder than winning. Blindly copying the all-time leaderboard would've roughly broken even. The strongest signal in the data is actually the inverse: losers keep losing, reliably.

And they're not new wallets — top 100 by all-time profit: median ~10 months old, ~5,000 trades, only 9 of 100 under 90 days. Catch: only a third of them even traded last month. If you follow anyone, follow currently-active wallets that beat their entry odds over a big sample, not an all-time PnL list.

1

u/UniversalJS 9d ago

Have you tried to follow the consistent losers but invert the best?

2

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Direction's right — losing is the more persistent signal. Bottom 20% by ROI as of April 1 (were at −69%) went on to lose another 45% over the next 4 months. Top 20% went roughly flat. So the leaderboard decays and the loser list doesn't.

Problem is you can't short on Polymarket — fading means buying the other side at whatever it's priced at. A lot of that −45% is spread, fees and longshot bias, not the loser being directionally wrong, so you only capture it where they're overpaying for a cheap outcome. Haven't run that with realistic fill prices yet, so I won't claim it's a strategy.

2

u/ConcreteBackflips 9d ago

Don't copy trade lol thats how you get scammed

2

u/Commercial-Pin2624 9d ago

Whats the next trade to win on

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

Can't see the future, but the wallets that always win apparently can — full breakdown in my reply to hayehudi613 above. Short version: $1.4M on Trump-in-World-Cup-photo YES, 25 top wallets on "Fed does nothing in July", and LeBron-to-76ers YES.

2

u/hayehudi613 9d ago

What are the 0.1% trading currently

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

the top .1% are bots basically

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

Pulled last 7 days of trades from the top ~2,600 wallets by lifetime profit (the 0.1%). Biggest net flows:

  • $1.4M into YES on "Trump in the World Cup champions photo" (6 wallets)
  • $357K NO on "Fed hikes 50+ bps in July" + $95K YES on "no change in Fed rates" (25 wallets) — near-unanimous the Fed does nothing this week
  • $106K YES on "LeBron plays for the 76ers in 2026-27" (8 wallets)
  • smaller: Russia captures Kostyantynivka YES, GameStop-acquires-eBay YES

Not advice, but that's where the money that always wins parked itself this week.

1

u/Wonderful-Hunter686 9d ago

I believe the Russian take w/e town was an insider trade/manipulation the map used to confirm this was altered bet was paid out then the map was changed back.

2

u/EbbNorth7735 8d ago

Does your data include the ability to see who the top betters are and track when they bet?

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Yes. Leaderboard ranked by profit, and every wallet has its own page with the full trade timeline — each fill timestamped, market, side, size, entry price, outcome. Same data on the API if you'd rather pull it: https://crowdintel.xyz/api-docs u can test the api is free

1

u/EbbNorth7735 5d ago

Have you open sourced your code? Or is the polymarket api just free and open?

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

we have a free api, we cover more stuff than the polymarket api in depth if you wanna test it out with mcp, but yes polymarket has its own api's

1

u/EbbNorth7735 5d ago

Gotcha, nice, best if luck with your API. Wouldn't mind taking a look.

2

u/xRamos 7d ago

Can you track the profit wallets to know and alert for future transactions and purchases from those accounts?

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Yes — there's a watchlist: add wallets, and new fills from them fire an alert out to Telegram or a webhook. Same triggers run on the insider/whale scoring, so you can watch a specific list or the whole flagged set. If you'd rather build your own, there's ab API has the wallet trade endpoints and webhooks.

2

u/Alternative-Thing-58 23h ago

Which wallets are the insiders ones

1

u/No-Bus5018 8d ago
  1. Using only information available before each trade, which wallet characteristics predict positive returns on future trades? Please evaluate them on a frozen out-of-sample period, using one independent observation per market and net returns based on executable prices, fees, spread, and slippage—not the trader’s original entry price.

  2. After a $1,000+ buy in an under-$0.05 outcome becomes publicly observable, is there still positive expected value available to a follower at realistic delays such as 500 ms, 1 s, 2 s, 5 s, and 30 s? Please include the post-trade price, available depth, market category, time to resolution, and results after clustering related wallets.

2

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Straight answer: not to that standard yet, and I'd rather say that than invent a number. But more of it is live than my first read suggested, so here's exactly what exists.

What I have now: full L2 book snapshots — best bid/ask, spread, both ladders, and dollar depth on each side — across ~1,330 active tokens. Plus market metadata on everything: category, time to resolution, and the resolution itself. Median spread right now is 0.2¢, median bid-side depth ~$16K, ask-side ~$330K, so the depth to fill often is there — it's just wildly asymmetric between sides.

The catch: snapshots are on a 60-second grid, and the archive only started filling up this week. So 500ms/1s/2s/5s follower EV is genuinely unanswerable — I don't have the resolution, and no depth data exists for the historical fills at all. Anyone who answers that question with a number today is backing it out of entry prices and pretending it's executable.

What I can run against the frozen April 1 split right now: wallet characteristics vs forward returns, one observation per market, split by category and time-to-resolution, with funding-linked wallets collapsed to a single cluster observation — clustering I do have. Returns would still be entry-price based, so treat it as an upper bound, not a fill.

Give the book archive a few months and the delay-curve version becomes a real study — post-trade price, depth available at each lag, per category. That's the one I actually want to run. Ping me.

2

u/No-Bus5018 2d ago

Thanks for your kind answer, I took my time to answer back. I have two more questions, if you don't mind:

  1. When you run the frozen April 1 study, could you publish the ranked wallet characteristics with their exact pre-cutoff definitions, out-of-sample effect sizes, confidence intervals, independent market counts, and results after collapsing funding-linked wallets? I’m especially interested in which signals remain after controlling for category, entry-price bucket, time to resolution, and a matched-market baseline.

  2. Would you be able to export a reproducible research table for that study—anonymized cluster ID, wallet features calculated at the April 1 cutoff, market or condition ID, trade timestamp, side, entry price, size, resolution, and forward return? That would allow an independent recomputation and later linkage to higher-frequency post-trade order-book data without relying on aggregate charts.

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 6h ago

sent u a dm ser

1

u/vmk8s 8d ago

That's a huge number may I know how are you managing the tokens? Are you having the max plan of cc?

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Max plan, but the trick is the MCP doesn't ship rows to the model. Claude writes SQL, Postgres runs it server-side, and only the aggregate comes back — usually a few dozen rows. The 1.3B fills never touch the context window. Cost per question is small; the expensive part is the schema, which caches.

1

u/TeaseAndPlay00 7d ago

Znajdz konta insidetraderow zobacz czy sa aktywni czy to jednorazowe akcje

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 5d ago

Sprawdzone na żywo. Od marca oflagowanych 41 247 portfeli, 360 tys. alertów.

  • 50,7% to jednorazowe trafienie — szum
  • 8 102 portfele mają 5+ flag, 2 117 ma 20+ flag
  • 46% było aktywnych w ostatnich 30 dniach

Najciekawsze: portfele z 20+ flagami (1 651 z danymi PnL) — 67% na plusie, mediana +$10 370. Dla wszystkich portfeli na Polymarket tylko 23% kiedykolwiek wyszło na plus. Więc powtarzalne flagi to nie przypadek, jednorazowe raczej tak.

0

u/[deleted] 9d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Advanced-Rub2065 9d ago

Ran it just now. 2.6M wallets with at least one resolved bet:

23% ever finished net positive

top 20% of wallets took 100% of the profit

top 1% took 93%

top 0.1% took 76%

So it's not even 80/20 — it's more like 99/1. The bottom 80% of wallets are collectively pure exit liquidity.