Questions · Whales
How to track Polymarket whales (and vet them before copying)
Whale tracking has two halves: seeing who moves size, and knowing whether their record is real. Most people do the first and skip the second — and the second is where copy trading lives or dies.
Your three options for the first half
- Leaderboards — free, but they show cumulative claimed profit, not current flow, and hide their accounting method entirely.
- Block explorers — every trade is on Polygon, but decoding conditional-token transfers wallet-by-wallet is forensic work, not monitoring.
- The public trade tape — every fill with wallet, side, size and price. This is the primary source; it just needs filtering and aggregation.
The Whale Trades Tracker automates the third: every trade above your USD threshold, with per-wallet summaries (total flow, buy/sell split, net direction, largest trade) ranked and ready. A 24-hour scan at a $5k threshold costs roughly $0.25–$0.85.
The half everyone skips: vetting
A wallet that moved $80k this week might be brilliant, lucky, or a market-maker whose "profits" you structurally cannot copy. Before following anyone, run the address through the Wallet P&L Analyzer ($0.35) and check three numbers: win_rate over resolved markets (open positions prove nothing), two_sided_share (high = hedger, never copy), and coverage_capped (are the stats even complete?). The full discover → vet → monitor pipeline is written up in the market-intelligence playbook — about $8 end to end.
Questions
Frequently asked
What USD threshold defines a whale?
There's no official definition — the tracker makes it your input. $5,000 surfaces serious size on most markets; $500–$1,000 catches consistent smart money; $100,000+ isolates true whales.
Can I get alerts when a whale trades?
Yes — schedule the tracker (e.g. hourly), attach an Apify webhook, and route trades above your threshold to Slack or Discord.
Why did a 'profitable' wallet fail vetting?
Usually one of three reasons: profit was in open (unresolved) positions, profit was a negative-risk mint artifact, or the wallet trades both sides as a hedger. The analyzer flags all three explicitly.
Polymarket Whale Trades Tracker
A 24-hour scan at a $5k threshold typically returns 100–400 trades: about $0.25–$0.85 per run.