How to check a Polymarket trader's real record before copying them

The three ways a wallet looks better than it is

1. Open positions counted as profit. A wallet “up $50k” on markets that haven’t resolved has realized nothing. Prices move; unresolved gains are marks, not money. An honest record counts realized P&L only over resolved markets and reports open positions separately with cost basis.

2. Negative-risk mint artifacts. Polymarket’s neg-risk adapter lets a wallet acquire outcome shares without a matching buy on the tape. Those shares later appear as sells with no corresponding purchase — and a naive calculation reads that as pure profit. Markets where sell volume far exceeds buy volume have to be flagged and excluded, or the number is fiction.

3. Hedgers wearing a trader’s clothes. A market maker trading both sides of the same market can post steady profits you cannot copy directionally — by the time you take one side, you are not running their strategy at all. The tell is the share of markets where the wallet traded both outcomes.

The three numbers to demand

The Wallet P&L Analyzer reconstructs any wallet’s record from the public tape and reports exactly these:

• win_rate — over resolved markets only, with the resolved count beside it so you can judge the sample
• two_sided_share — the hedger tell. High means don’t copy, however good the P&L looks
• coverage_capped — whether the public tape’s pagination limit cut the history short, plus the exact span the stats do cover

Plus mint_excluded_markets, so you can see how much was set aside as artifact rather than counted as skill.

A vetting funnel that costs about $8

Run the Whale Trades Tracker over the last few days and rank wallets by net buy flow. Take the top 20 candidates and run each through the analyzer at $0.35 — about $7 — then keep only wallets with a resolved-market win rate above your bar, a low two-sided share, and complete coverage. The funnel costs less than a single bad copied trade, and because it runs on public data you can re-run it monthly instead of trusting a leaderboard screenshot.