Polymarket guides
How Polymarket works on chain, how to judge a trader, how to get the data, and how to copy trade without fooling yourself.
How Polymarket works on chain
Polymarket proxy wallets: why a profile address is not the wallet you sign with
Every Polymarket account trades through a smart-contract wallet, not through the key that signs its orders. Knowing which address is which explains why a profile address looks unfamiliar, why per-address trackers split traders in two, and which address a bot needs.
How Polymarket shares work: conditional tokens, split, merge and redeem
A Polymarket share is a token on Polygon, created by the Conditional Token Framework. Four operations — split, merge, trade and redeem — explain why YES and NO add up to about a dollar and why a trader's profit cannot be read from fills alone.
Polymarket NegRisk markets explained: multi-outcome events and NO conversions
Questions with many possible answers — who wins an election, which team wins a league — are built on Polymarket as a set of linked yes/no markets. The link, called NegRisk, lets a trader convert NO shares into YES shares on every other answer, and it is where most trackers get profit wrong.
Reading Polymarket from the Polygon chain: contracts and events
Every Polymarket trade, split, merge and redemption is a log on Polygon. This is the map: which contracts matter, which events they emit, and the traps between a raw log and a correct number.
Polymarket token IDs, condition IDs and slugs: how they connect
A Polymarket market has a slug for people, a condition ID for the contracts, and one token ID per outcome for trading. Every data source speaks a different one of the three, and joining them is the first thing any Polymarket tool has to get right.
Polymarket trading fees: who pays, how they are calculated, and where to see them
Polymarket charges a fee on taking liquidity in many markets, sized by the price of the trade. Fees decide whether a strategy that looks profitable is, and whether copying a trader costs you more than it cost them.
Polymarket redemptions and auto-redeem: what happens when a market resolves
When a Polymarket market resolves, winning shares become claims on collateral. How they are claimed — by the trader, or automatically by Polymarket — changes what the chain shows, and trackers that miss it record a winning trade as shares given away.
Judging a trader
Polymarket whale tracking: follow skill, not size
A whale tracker tells you who bet big. Size says a wallet has money, not that it is right. This is how to watch large Polymarket traders without copying their mistakes.
Luck or skill on Polymarket? Take away the best market and look again
A large realised profit can be one market that went right. The simplest test of a Polymarket record is to remove the single most profitable market and see what is left — and most records do not survive it.
Polymarket win rate: why 100% means nothing without a sample size
A win rate is the most quoted number about a Polymarket trader and the easiest to misread. Read it with the number of markets behind it, through its confidence interval — and know what it leaves out.
How to calculate a Polymarket wallet's PnL — and why sites disagree
Two sites can show the same Polymarket wallet with different profits and both be honest. The difference is in the window, what counts as realised, how open positions are priced, and whether the record follows the address or the trader.
Maker or taker: reading how a Polymarket trader earns
Every Polymarket fill has a maker, whose resting order was filled, and a taker, whose order crossed the spread. Which side a trader is usually on tells you how they make money — and whether you could make it by following them.
How to spot a market maker on Polymarket — and why not to copy one
Some of the most profitable wallets on Polymarket are market makers: they quote both sides, trade thousands of times a day and have no view on who wins. Their records are real, but they are not a signal to follow.
Data and APIs
How to get a Polymarket wallet's trades in real time
Three ways to see what a Polymarket trader does as they do it — polling Polymarket's Data API, reading fills from the Polygon chain yourself, or subscribing to a push feed — and what each one costs you.
Polymarket data in Python: markets, a wallet's trades, and live fills
The quickest working route to Polymarket data from Python: Polymarket's public Gamma and Data APIs for markets and a wallet's history, the CLOB client for trading, and the PMWallets SDK for ranked traders and their fills in real time.
Polymarket WebSocket API: what the market and user channels give you
Polymarket's CLOB WebSocket streams order books and price changes for the markets you name, and your own orders and trades. It does not stream other people's trades. Here is what each channel is for, and what to use when you need a trader's fills.
Polymarket trade alerts by webhook: receive, verify, deduplicate
A webhook turns every fill of a Polymarket trader you follow into an HTTPS request to your own server — for alerts in your own chat, a dashboard, or a bot that should not hold a WebSocket open. This is how to receive them correctly.
How to export a Polymarket wallet's full trade history
Polymarket's own trade endpoint returns at most 10,000 historical trades per wallet, and stitching a trader's several wallets together is up to you. A trade-history export gives every fill of a trader, from the chain, one CSV file per wallet per day.
Copy trading
How to set up a Polymarket copy-trading bot
A step-by-step setup for the open-source PMWallets copy-trading bot: a separate Polymarket account, the right region, the traders to follow, a dry run, and the limits that keep it safe.
Polymarket copy-trading risks: what eats a copied edge
Copying a profitable Polymarket trader does not copy their profit. Here is where the difference goes — delay, price, fees, size, exits — and the limits that keep a copy-trading bot from turning a good trader into a bad trade.
Backtest copy trading on Polymarket before risking money
A trader's record says what they made. A backtest says what you would have made following them — later, at worse prices, paying fees they may not have paid, and skipping the trades your rules reject. The two numbers are rarely the same.
Polymarket order types: GTC, GTD, FOK and FAK — and which a bot should use
Polymarket's order book takes limit orders that rest (GTC, GTD) and orders that must fill now (FOK, FAK). The choice decides whether a bot gets the trade it meant, a partial one, or a surprise.
Polymarket crypto Up or Down markets: how they work and what wins them
Up or Down markets ask one thing: will a coin finish a short window higher or lower than it started? They settle fast, trade constantly and reward speed — which makes them the easiest markets to measure a trader in, and among the hardest to copy.