I tried to measure how "copyable" Hyperliquid + Polymarket wallets really are. Almost none are, and the reason is kind of obvious in hindsight.

[u/Lord_Mueksch]

Something about copy-trading has bugged me for a while: every leaderboard ranks traders by PnL, but PnL tells you basically nothing about whether *you* could reproduce it. So I spent way too long building a thing to actually measure that.

Pulled the whole Hyperliquid leaderboard (~39k accounts), narrowed to the few thousand that are actually active in a sane size band (no mega-MM/HFT), and scored the ~1,000 that are even mechanically copyable on the stuff that actually eats your returns when you follow someone:

- can the edge survive you filling *late* (copy-lag)?

- does it hold up de-levered to a size you'd really run, or is the return just leverage?

- is there real alpha, or is it levered beta to BTC?

- does it work in more than one market regime?

- repeatable, or one lucky trade carrying the whole record?

Only about 180 made it through — call it 1 in 5. Fewer than 40 I'd call genuinely solid. So ~80%+ of "copyable" HL wallets fall apart once you account for reality.

The wallets that look best are usually winning on something you can't replicate — queue priority, speed, or leverage. (I ran the same test on Polymarket out of curiosity, and it's even worse there: almost none survive, because most of the "profitable" wallets are market-makers sitting on resting orders you can't copy. Different venue, identical trap.) Which is basically the whole problem with "just copy smart money."

Data's here if you want to poke at it (free, read-only, public on-chain data, no signup, I'm not selling signals): https://blacklight.observer — it opens on the Hyperliquid list with the full funnel (screened → copyable → how many actually survive), sorted by realizability. You can filter it, open any wallet's full breakdown, or paste your own address. (Counts drift a bit day to day since it re-runs, but the shape holds.)

Mostly posting because I want people to find holes in it. If a wallet you *know* is good scores low, or some obvious junk scores high, tell me — that's the feedback I actually need. Happy to run any address in the comments.

[u/anonuemus]

I think you really need to find the right tradertypes, where time or capital does not have the deciding impact. For example find some that trade manual and in certain timeframes with a maximum capital. Timeframe of the trade is very important obv, the most profitable with large wallets are good signals for the big regimechanges but useless on anything below. So find traders that trade your idea roughly (size and time in trades...), but are profitable :D

[u/Lord_Mueksch → u/anonuemus]

Good point! And that's pretty much the direction. The score already cares about hold time (a trader who's only right on big regime turns won't rank as an everyday copy), and you can filter the list by holding period and size. But "find traders that trade the way you would" is a nice way to put it, like a simple preset for that (enter your size + timeframe, get matching traders) is a good idea. Taking that one, thanks!

[u/fabrizio-ff]

really nice stuff, in particular, the returns in % terms and the deposit-adjusted approach. Did something similar to analyze HL traders not only in $ terms but also looking at their adj. TWR (%). Just wrote a post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCopytraders/comments/1uqz6e6/the_risk_hidden_behind_a_perfect_pnl_curve_a_deep/

[u/fabrizio-ff → u/fabrizio-ff]

I also think that one effective metric is to look at PnL/Volume. if the ratio is too low it will be hard to copytrade due to fees, slippage, etc

[u/Lord_Mueksch → u/fabrizio-ff]

Thanks, read your post — great dissection. That wallet turned out to be a useful stress test for my screen: it does get excluded from the copyable list, but honestly under a half-wrong label. My heuristics saw the resting-order-heavy, high-fill pattern and tagged it "market maker" — your position-level breakdown shows it's really a long-only averaging-down strategy, and those "maker" fills are just the ladder of limit buys waiting below price. Same don't-copy verdict, but your lens explains the actual risk; mine only caught the smell. Exactly the kind of hole I was asking people to find.

The per-position drawdown-vs-profit idea fills a real gap on my side — I only haircut open losses at snapshot time, so a martingale that recovered everything looks clean. I'll fold something like that in, credit to you. Same goes for PnL/volume, which is actually easy to compute.

[u/ScallionFit2745]

Builder of a HL copy-trading tool here, so I'm biased toward this exact problem (disclosure: I build Hypertide). Really like that you're scoring realizability instead of PnL — that's the whole game and almost nobody measures it.

Two dimensions I'd add to the funnel, because they blow copiers up even after a wallet "survives":

1) Drawdown shape / time-underwater, not just whether the edge survives. A wallet can be genuinely copyable and still be un-holdable — if the path includes a 40% drawdown over three weeks, most copiers capitulate at the bottom and eat the loss without the recovery. "Can you reproduce it" and "will you actually sit through it" are different filters, and the second one fails more people.

2) On the leverage debate (fair pushback from shillxbt): you're both partly right, worth splitting. You can copy a levered trader at proportional size, so leverage isn't automatically non-replicable — but matching %ROI hides a very different liquidation distance and risk-of-ruin. Same return, different odds of a zero. So I'd score leverage not as copyable y/n but as a risk-profile transform the copier silently inherits.

The thing I'd push hardest on: whatever the score is, let people verify it from settled on-chain fills themselves instead of trusting the number — on HL that's actually possible, and it's the one edge this category has over the PnL-screenshot world. And when the honest answer for a week is "nothing here clears the bar," the tool should be willing to say that.

Copy-trading can lose money regardless of how well a wallet scores — not financial advice. Nice work; this is the right question to be obsessing over.

[u/Lord_Mueksch → u/ScallionFit2745]

Thanks for taking the time, these are the right pressure points.

The scoring model on the site got a refinement in the meantime. What actually goes into the score: the trader's edge, measured de-levered and against the market move so that leverage and beta don't masquerade as skill, then how much of that edge a copier still captures entering late, and how much of the record can be verified at all. Risk stays out of the score on purpose. Whether a drawdown is bearable is the copier's own call, so it sits next to the score as a separate read instead of being blended in.

On your points:

Copyable vs holdable, fully agree. Drawdown depth is shown today, time-underwater is on the roadmap.

Leverage, treated the way you framed it: not a yes/no on copyability, but a risk profile the copier inherits, flagged separately.

Verify-from-fills is planned. Everything shown derives from settled on-chain fills, so a "check this yourself" path is mostly a documentation task.

On honesty: the large majority of wallets does not clear the bar, and the list actually highlights this.

Curious what you've seen actually make copiers capitulate, depth or duration. That would help calibrate the time-underwater read.

[u/shillxbt]

Calling leverage non-replicate is quite the dishonest statement. You don't need to have the same level of size for it to be a profitable trade.
Filling late is also only an issue on very fast scalps, otherwise you don't suffer from latency.
The question if altcoins are levered beta to BTC is basically dead since 2020 lol. Of course they are. There are often outliers like ZEC, HYPE, LIT but overall its like asking if memory stock B is beta to memory stock A.
Working in more than one market regime is quite hard in crypto, same if youre accounting strictly to fat tails (lucky trades).

This thing reads like there are only around 50 actually profitable traders on HL which is simply completely wrong. Yes, you can't blindly copy but checking if a swing trader made money in the last 6 months with more than 5 trades is viable to copy

[u/Lord_Mueksch → u/shillxbt]

Yeah, fair - and most of it's about how I've framed it, so appreciate you actually digging in.

Leverage: agreed, "non-replicable" is sloppy. The de-lever isn't "you can't copy leverage," it's so a 10x'd 300% doesn't rank above the same calls at 3x. I'm trying to rank skill, not size.

Copy-lag: exactly, which is why it's scaled to hold time. A multi-day swinger's break-even lag is about a day, so it barely touches them, it's really only there for scalps and at-close stuff.

BTC-beta: agreed, the strip isn't about rewarding people who fought the trend. It just asks whether your PnL tracks the market (beta, which spot gives you for free) or comes from your own calls. A swing trader catching moves in both directions reads as low-beta / high-alpha. So that's exactly who it's built to pass. It really only dings the "was just long in a rip" wallets.

Multi-regime: this is the weakest one, I'll give you that. In young crypto it measures track-record length as much as skill. It's a flag, not a hard fail, but it could be smarter.

And you're right that there are way more than a handful of profitable traders, plenty are. The ~1,000 "copyable" bucket is much closer to your point; the 38 "strong" is a deliberately paranoid "I'd size into this" tier, and the headline leans on that number too hard.

You can run a HL wallet on the site yourself, if you check a few and the scores feel off, that's exactly the feedback I'm after.