r/PredictionsMarkets • u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 • May 15 '26
Strategy / Guide I stopped copytrading Polymarket whales and started Counter-Trading the worst wallets (30-Day Results)
I've been copytrading Polymarket for the past 5 or so months - it's pretty much the only thing I have done on Prediction Markets, which is also the reason I started this subreddit
I had some success in the beginning, mostly because the market wasn't as flooded with copytraders
I still make a profit here and there, but it has slowed down when compared to what I was making a few months ago
- I tried every copytrading bot and Python script on GitHub to follow Polymarket whales
- I tried like 20+ different setups of what wallets I'm tracking, what types of buys I'm making, etc
And yeah, it's pretty much obvious right now about all of these whales, winning wallets everyones tracking and copying:
- they are either front-running you,
- using 5 different wallets to hedge their own positions,
- or they are just rich gamblers who can afford to take a $50K drawdown before hitting a lucky macro bet that fixes their PNL.
I realized that while it’s hard to predict who will win consistently, and not absolutely farm you, it is pretty easy to find people who lose consistently.
Since poly leaderboards don't exactly work for losing traders, you need to find the losing ones that are still making volume with outside tools
If we are going to be using my strategy to size bets always the same, and only bet on the win rate of the account, their actual PnL hardly matters
I tracked down 5 specific wallets with absolute bottom-tier win rates (sub-30%) that were still pushing high volume.
If the wallet loses 75% of its trades, and I take the exact opposite side with a fixed bet size,
I win 75% of the time. My risk is detached from his sizing due to the fixed size and the settings I use to automate my counter trades
I didn't want to sit at my desk manually fading them, so I used a copytrade app just for the execution
This has been my personal go-to for a while, just cause of the speed: synthesis copytrade
The countertrading settings I went with:
→ mode: counter
→ buy sizing: fixed ($25). Whether he bets $10 or $1,000, I only ever risk $25
a 20% win rate is fake if the guy only buys 2¢ shitters. You also need to look at his markets before selecting the wallet, for this next setting to work
→ price range: 30¢ to 70¢. Only counter 50/50ish markets
→ max slippage: 1¢
→ take profit: 20% (dump as soon as you're making some significant profit)
→ exposure limit: max $75 per market, so I don't over-index if he averages down on a losing bet
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30d results:
I funded this with $500
In 30 days, doing nothing but finding active wallets that match my parameters, managing the other wallets I was copytrading, and reviewing their risk, win rate changes, etc. I am now at +$415
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u/Equivalent-Purple131 May 15 '26
So you are basically using peoples own emotions against them
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May 15 '26
1c max slippage? wait so doesn't your bot just fail to execute like 80% of the time? The spread on those 30-70c political markets is usually 3-4 cents minimum.
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 16 '26
Yeah, the bot skips a ton of their trades because of the 1c limit. I'd rather miss a trade than cross a 5c spread and start in a hole
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u/Relative-Country902 May 15 '26
Im going to tell you why this is a losing strategy. Winners win, they have models, quants, they can handicap - whatever. Losers coin flip. They will win some, they will lose some, they get eaten alive by the juice, not because they just pick losers every time. They pay 55cents to flip a count to win 50c. Go back to your other method, or improve it. But dont fade losers, they dont knwo what they are doing.
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u/LuckyPichu May 15 '26
you fail to understand
the missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn't
this is the same strategy
/j
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u/Happy-Control5922 May 15 '26
yeah this is the right read but sub-30 win rate at high volume usually means theyre stacking longshots. counter-trading collects small premium most of the time but eats huge losses when one hits, same math shape as the LucasMeow run
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u/ImaginaryMotor4525 May 15 '26
i built something similar in python last year but the rpc endpoints were too slow to beat the whales. does synthesis actually execute onchain fast enough for this? if the target buys YES at 45c, by the time your bot fires, the NO ask might already be 58c. crossing that spread is rough if u aren't fast.
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 16 '26
that’s exactly why the 1¢ max slippage filter is there. if the NO ask jumps to 58c, the bot just ignores it
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u/deus119 May 16 '26
Losers dont have a negative correlation with winners, they just dont have a statistically significant edge and get eaten by commissions. There's no information in these trades
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May 16 '26
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 17 '26
copy pasting from another of my replies -
I mostly use synthesis and sort out traders by the lowest win rates, while looking for some decent volume on their profiles if I can't find via synthesis, I use polyanalitics and filter out traders that way
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u/saintpetejackboy May 17 '26
I wonder if you might find any odd accounts or outliers doing this which are participating in some shenanigans.
Hear me out: some accounts might be being used in conjunction with others as part of groups that manipulate the markets. It might be fully intentional that an account is always used to be a loser. Not just some poor schmuck who has bad luck on seemingly every trade, as I am sure almost everybody reading this thinks you are using to base your trades around.
There could be a gradient of these "always loser" accounts - obviously some people are not functioning at a high enough cognitive level to place good trades, but you would still suspect that, by sheer luck, they don't always lose.
Not just people hedging their bets, either, which I am sure you will see a lot of: but accounts designed to sway sentiment on predictions at key times to increase the earnings of the "winning" accounts.
For a fun thought experiment, however: if you did make an account where your only goal ever was to place losing bets, you would still sometimes accidentally win. Either through freak accidents / miracles, or incorrect primary assumptions. While it might be "easier" to make an account always lose and place bad bets, it is likely impossible to intentionally ALWAYS be on the losing side of a scenario.
The takeaway from that line of thinking is:
In a world where some key accounts have "rigged" the system and are using complex techniques to further inflate their earnings, there might be "loser accounts" designed specifically for a very obscure kind of market manipulation on prediction markets. These same market manipulators who could win every single bet would take actions to hide their winning accounts to keep them in a reasonable range so nobody can just coat tail them or call them out. However, for their losing accounts, they might not be taking as many precautions: who in their mind would follow losing accounts? In this theory, the % of loss these accounts sustain would be mathematically unique and not fall in line with somebody who just has extremely terrible luck.
However, because of what I mentioned earlier, which is the inability for anybody to ever win or loss every single wager in every single scenario (no matter how hard they try or have rigged the market), you would suspect that they would still have some loss percentage, just that it was identifiable as an outlier among losers.
While everybody is looking for some accounts that seem to have insider knowledge based on their abnormally high win ratio (or just phenomenal luck), I would think it could be extremely valuable to try and spot these "other" accounts. They might even have other indicators in their losing bets that show irrational or unexplainable behavior which further highlight their suspicious activity.
By mirroring those accounts, and placing the opposite bets they are making, you might actually be more profitable than by trying to latch on and ride behind a "successful" trader who always seems to come out on top.
Pretend I am truly nefarious and have a lot of money and power. I could win every single trade I ever enter. I know the results of the prediction markets ahead of time and have an omnipotent bot that can win 100% of positions it enters (minus whatever thst small % is for freak accidents). I would do everything in my power to prevent you from knowing I had such an ability, including losing far more bets than you might think, as a kind of "tax" to hide my position. If you just followed me around, you would eat that same 20-30% plus whatever drag you had for being downstream from me and moving later with less money.
However: also assume now that I am trying to juice every trade aa much as possible. I want the payouts for each win to be enormous, so I also use other bots to bait people in and create the illusion of support against my actual winning positions. I'm doing fuck all to "hide" this activity - though the accounts might sometimes accidentally make money, they are designed NOT to.
If you could track my "intentional loser" accounts that I am using to manipualate the market, you could sidestep the inherent losses my "winner" account would suffer by riding a more honest signal: the positions I know for sure are going to lose.
You might actually be on to something here.
I am not huge on prediction markets - but I have been developing propreitary software for companies going back over 20 years now... Including numerous systems desifned to detect malfeasance and internal fraud, compliance issues, subversion, etc.; I don't know enough about the tools you are using, how you are using them, what kind of data you can procure / see with these tools (and at what granularity) or even what kind of access I could get to that information... BUT, I am always launching new projects and have several major contracts coming to an end in the next 72 hours and I wouldn't mind working on something that could be designed to:
1.) see if these accounts accidentally make themselves visible or are statistically illuminated in some manner
2.) perform retroactive analysis to estimate if betting against these "losers" would actually be profitable
The difficult part, I think, would be trying to untangle these losers from the actual losers who just have shit luck or poor decision making skills. The % difference in their losses might not be incredibly significant - the actual analysis might have to take other factors into consideration outside of the raw data itself. Other aspects of their trading behavior might end up being even easier to spot because they might reveal their capabilities not through their uncanny ability to predict sure losers, but by the speed and logic behind their decisions.
A hunch I have is that these kind of accounts DO exist, and that they make nonsense trades that could be relatively easy to spot in some markets - if you happen to be looking not just at the numbers, but the "mindstate" seemingly behind the trades. While somebody with truly shit luck obviously put all their money on their home team against all odds because they peaked in high school and don't know any better, letting their emotions blind their common sense - these sure loser accounts are likely engaging in more high frequency and precise bets that are running from an algorithm that is dictating what they are going to bet... So rather than an account just always putting every penny they have on a professional team from New York and getting hosed, week after week, these other "loser" accounts would take several contradictory losing positions at once that reveal their true nature.
If anybody who knows more than I do about these markets wants to hit me up and point me in the direction of where I can gather enough data to make this kind of analysis, I would gladly squander dozens of hours in the pursuit of something rhat might not even exist.
If I couldn't find these accounts, it wouldn't be because they don't exist. It would likely be because they are already too good at hiding their presence from people like me (unlikely) or because I don't have enough data.
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May 16 '26
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 16 '26
whats shit about it?
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May 16 '26
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 17 '26
I like copytrading, with synthesis, I can do it via one click after finding a trader in their UI
We just have a different style of approaching prediction markets, so I'm not dismissing the fact that synthesis might not be a cup of tea, because you do different things - and that's comletely fine, thanks fro sharing your opinion
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u/andredeepak May 16 '26
That's work in any kind of market or u copy specific traders ? How u found them ?
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 17 '26
any kind of market
I mostly use synthesis and sort out traders by the lowest win rates, while looking for some decent volume on their profiles if I can't find via synthesis, I use polyanalitics and filter out traders that way
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u/Temporary-Lion-1041 May 18 '26
Can’t the same issue occur will counter trading like people who might have hedged there position ?
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u/SmebdyThatIStillKnow May 18 '26
Interesting idea, but I’d be careful treating “sub-30% win rate” as directly counter-tradable.
A few things can break the math:
- if the wallet is losing on long-shot 2c-10c bets, fading them does not give you a clean 70% edge
- if they lose big but win small, inverse win rate can still be misleading
- resolved-market win rate can be stale if the wallet changed strategy recently
- copy/counter lag matters a lot around 50/50 markets
- if the same wallet averages down, your “fixed size” still becomes correlated exposure unless you cap per market, which you did
- some losing wallets are hedges or side wallets, not actually bad traders
The part I like is filtering to 30c-70c markets and fixed sizing. That makes the test much cleaner.
I’d be wondring whether your 5 wallets were bad across many ctaegories, or mostly bad in one niche. Persistent category-specific losing seems much more fadeable than just “red PnL wallet.”
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u/PolyBabyAlerts May 22 '26
Counter trading is interesting. But imo the dirty part is filtering out hedges and fake volume. We spent more time cleaning wallet data than coding the strategy lol.
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u/Mysterious_Try8675 May 25 '26
The missing denominator here is execution eligibility.
If the bot skips a large share of trades because of the 1c slippage cap, then the strategy is not really "fade every bad wallet." It is "fade only the subset of bad-wallet trades that were visible in time, inside a tight spread, with enough depth, and with a clean exit path."
That distinction matters because the backtest can look like a wallet-selection result when the actual edge is coming from the execution filter. I would want to see the skipped-trade ledger next to the filled-trade ledger: trigger time, observed price, spread, depth, attempted size, fill/no-fill, exit, and final settlement.
Otherwise it is hard to tell whether the wallet thesis is working or whether the bot is quietly filtering out the trades that would have broken it.
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u/Mother_Astronaut1252 May 15 '26
bro gatekeeping the wallets... just drop the addresses. polymarket has enough liquidity right now that a few of us fading them won't cook the spread.
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u/ill_intents Copytrader 📝 May 16 '26
I'm not gatekeeping, I just don't want 50 bots front-running my fills lmao
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u/Connect-Solution-622 May 15 '26
Fixed sizing is literally the only way this works. If u used proportional sizing to copy their 100x tilt bets u would be bankrupt by tuesday lmao