Methodology: How Whalidate Scores Wallets and Copies Trades

Whalidate reads public Polymarket data to score wallets on how they made their money. You pick the wallets and set the rules, and Whalidate copies only the new trades that pass those rules, at the price the order book offers at that moment. Every strategy can run on paper, with virtual money, before any real money is involved. This page explains each step and where it falls short. Nothing on it is a promise of returns.

How wallets are collected

WhaleFinder is the part of Whalidate that finds wallets. It reads Polymarket's public data: the leaderboards, which rank wallets by profit overall and in several categories, all-time and over the last month, and each wallet's public trading activity. It needs no access to anyone's account; every Polymarket trade settles on the Polygon blockchain and is public.

Wallets that have stopped trading are set aside. WhaleFinder sweeps the leaderboards again over time, so the pool changes as wallets appear, improve or fade.

How wallets are scored

For each wallet, WhaleFinder reads its public trading history and replays it trade by trade. From that replay it measures:

• Return on investment (ROI): profit on the money the wallet put in, over its whole history.
• Settled trades: how many markets it has fully closed or seen resolve. Open positions showing a gain do not count.
• Worst drawdown: the deepest fall of its running profit from a peak, measured against the money it had at work.
• Share of profit from its best trade, and from its five best.
• How steady its profit curve is: a gradual climb across many trades scores better than one jump.
• Edge per trade, and how much of its trading is in sports.

These measures are there to tell skill from luck. A wallet that bought a long shot at a few cents and won sits high on a leaderboard, but its record rests on one bet. So do records built on a handful of trades, or on big wins given back later. Those are the records the scoring is meant to catch.

What "passing" means

A wallet passes our default filters when all four of these hold:

These are the filters behind the figures on our home page: on 30 September 2026, we had collected 15,371 wallets, scored 1,346 in full (their whole history read and replayed) and 166 passed, our own presets' wallets left out.

In the app's WhaleFinder you can tighten or loosen each of the four checks and filter by market category and by recent activity. The defaults are where you start, not a rule.

Passing is a screen, not a forecast. It says a record looks more like skill than luck. It does not say the wallet will keep winning: in our research on 15,371 wallets, the wallets that looked best over one 60-day period were not reliably the best over the next.

How a copy is placed

1. The whale trades

Whalidate watches the wallets your strategies follow through Polymarket's real-time trade feed, and polls Polymarket's public data as a backup. It copies the whales' buys. A whale's sell does not close your copy; your own exit rules do (below).

2. Your rules decide

Every trade goes through the strategy's checks before anything is sent:

• the size of the whale's trade, so small tests and hedges can be left out;
• the price band you allow for an entry;
• your slippage cap: how far, in cents, the price may have moved from the whale's;
• how soon or how late the market resolves;
• the markets you allow, by category;
• on Pro and Elite, rules for each whale on its own;
• your caps: per market, per event, on total exposure and the live budget.

Your loss limits (daily, weekly and drawdown) stop new entries once they are reached. A trade that fails any check is skipped, and the reason is recorded.

3. The order goes out at the current price

Just before sending, Whalidate reads the order book again. If the best price is now further from the whale's price than your slippage cap allows, or above the highest entry price you set, the copy is not placed. Otherwise it sends a fill-or-kill order for the whole copy, which fills completely or not at all.

A copy goes out after the whale's trade is seen, usually seconds to a minute later. By then the price may have moved. Your cap decides whether the copy still makes sense; Whalidate does not chase the price.

Why a copy can be refused or miss

• The price moved past your cap between the whale's trade and our order.
• The order book did not hold enough shares at an acceptable price.
• The order did not match in time. This happens most in markets where a game is being played.
• Polymarket refused the order, for example because the market had closed.
• One of your own limits stopped it: a cap, the live budget, the money in the wallet, or a copy below the $5 minimum, which keeps every position large enough to sell on Polymarket.

How a copy closes

Your copy does not follow the whale out. It closes on the exits you set: take-profit, stop-loss or a breakeven stop. Without them it is held until the market resolves. An exit sells at the prices available when it triggers, which in a fast or thin market can be far from its level. Pause, Stop and the emergency stop are always available in the app.

Paper and live

Paper and live strategies judge the same whale trades with the same rules. The difference is the fill.

• Paper copies fill at once, in full, at the price quoted when the signal arrives, with no fee and no limit on depth. Paper is free on every plan, with no time limit.
• Live orders meet the real order book. They can miss, fill at a worse price, and pay Polymarket's own fees where it charges them.

So paper is the optimistic case, and live results can be worse than paper results. Paper results and live results are kept apart.

To go live you need a paid plan and a funded trading wallet. Before the first live trade, the app shows the strategy's paper record and its worst drawdown and asks you to accept that risk. The strategy then trades with the same rules it ran on paper, within the live budget you set. Each plan runs one live strategy at a time. See Pricing for the budgets.

What results we show, and how

In the app, your results are your own copies, paper and live apart. Live results are shown after Polymarket's fees. Pro and Elite also break results down by market category and by entry price, after fees on live trades. Paper results carry no fees, because paper fills pay none.

On this site, the research figures (the four whale cards on our home page and the figures in our blog) come from a fixed-stake model on Polymarket's public data: $100 on every position a wallet closed, kept only if it passes the rules stated next to the figure, and exiting when the wallet exited. A fixed stake makes wallets of any size comparable. The model is not the product. It does not include slippage, Polymarket's fees on the copy, or our stops and take-profits, and live copies do not exit when the whale does. Every figure carries its date and its window. Where we show the strongest wallets, we say so: across all 166 passing wallets, the result of copying with the rules over the 120 days to 30 September 2026 was close to zero in dollars (−1.9%).

The limits

• Past results do not predict future ones. A wallet that passes can stop doing well, change what it trades, or have been lucky after all.
• Delay. A copy follows the whale's trade by seconds to a minute. The price can move in that time, and the copies that miss are not a random sample: a trade whose price runs away quickly is often a winning one.
• Liquidity. A fill-or-kill order fills whole or not at all. In a thin market a copy may not fill, and a larger copy needs more depth than a small one.
• Markets during play. When a game is live, prices move within seconds. Copies of those trades are refused or miss more often than others.
• Polymarket and the blockchain. Polymarket sets its own rules, fees and market resolutions, and outages on either side can delay trades and exits.

The Risk Disclosure covers these risks in full, and the Terms of Service say what the Service does and does not do. For how to pick wallets and set exits step by step, read how to copy Polymarket whales.