Polymarket Whales This Week: What 1,049 Wallets Traded (Week 41)

In the seven days to 11 October 2026, 863 of the 1,049 Polymarket wallets in our whale directory made at least one trade. Sports drew 54.5% of their dollar volume and esports 22.2%. More than half of all buys were under $10, yet buys of $1,000 or more carried 80% of the money. Positions that settled during the week returned +0.5% on the money put in, once the losing positions nobody redeemed are counted.

This report is an aggregate of public data. It does not name, rank or link individual wallets.

Key figures

1. 863 of 1,049 wallets (82%) traded at least once, making over 479,000 trades worth at least $98.6 million.
2. The 10% of active wallets with the most volume, 86 wallets, made 82% of it.
3. 572 of the 863 active wallets (66%) put 90% or more of their volume into one group of markets.
4. Buys of $1,000 or more were about 3% of all buys and 80% of the dollars bought.
5. 59% of the dollars bought went in at prices between 30¢ and 70¢.
6. The 99,946 positions that settled returned +0.5% on $94.5 million put in. Counting only positions that were sold or redeemed, it would have been +23.4%.

How active were the wallets?

The median active wallet made 48 trades. A trade here is one fill, a buy or a sell.

Where did the money go?

Within those groups, soccer took 20.3% of all volume, the NFL 18.2%, Counter-Strike 14.6%, tennis 4.2%, Dota 2 3.4% and League of Legends 3.1%. Politics drew more wallets than any other group but only 5.2% of the money.

Which markets drew the most wallets?

Counting the wallets that bought into each event during the week:

• Brazil's presidential election: 83 wallets.
• The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize: 58 wallets.
• Bitcoin up-or-down markets that settle every 5 or 15 minutes: 41 to 48 wallets each for the busiest ones.
• Whether the Iranian blockade is declared over by 31 October: 39 wallets.
• Team Falcons against Natus Vincere in Counter-Strike: 37 wallets.

How did the positions that settled this week end?

A position counts as settled when the wallet sold or redeemed it during the week, or when its market resolved and the wallet has not redeemed it yet. That second group matters. A winning share is redeemed to collect $1, but a losing share pays nothing, so many losing positions are never redeemed. This week there were 17,985 of them, with $17.8 million put in and 97% of them losses. Leaving them out would turn +0.5% into +23.4%.

By market group, sports returned −0.8% on $50.9 million put in, esports +2.0% on $21.2 million, crypto 0.0% on $11.2 million and politics +6.0% on $8.0 million.

One week is a small sample, and one resolved market can move a whole price band. The under-10¢ band shows it: few long shots won, and they carried a band where most positions lost. Our 120-day study of 15,371 wallets is a better guide to price bands than any single week.

How we picked these wallets

• The wallets. Every wallet in our public whale directory on 11 October 2026, 1,049 in all. None was chosen for this report or by its results this week. The directory holds the wallets we have measured in full, those that pass our checks and those that fail them.
• The data. Polymarket's public Data API: each wallet's activity in the week, its closed positions and its resolved positions not yet redeemed, from 4 October 13:56 UTC to 11 October 13:56 UTC.
• The terms. Volume is the dollar value of fills. Money in is a position's average entry price times its shares, and return is its profit or loss divided by that. Market groups come from keywords in each market's Polymarket address.
• The limits. One very active wallet returned more than 50,000 records in the week; we read its latest 50,000, so trade counts and volume are lower bounds.

How we score wallets is on our methodology page.

What this means if you copy whales

A week of whale activity shows where large wallets put their money, not whether they were right. Most dollars went into sports and esports at middle prices, and the positions that settled ended close to flat. A profit figure built from closed positions alone would have shown a much better week. Past results do not predict future ones. To see how a set of wallets would work for you, start a strategy on paper first.