# Best Polymarket Traders: 36 Wallets Took 44% of Gains, and Active Winners Kept Winning
Who makes money on Polymarket, whether winners keep winning, and how five leaderboards count. The top 1% of winning wallets took 43.9% of realised gains; 124 of 137 active June winners were profitable again in July, against a 41–51% repeat rate across all wallets month to month.
Canonical URL: https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards
Author: [Vultax Research](https://vultax.com/editorial-policy)
Published: 2026-09-11
Last public revision: 2026-09-16
Published research snapshots and calculations; these exports do not contain current quotes or live account data. Observation windows and populations are stated in the source captions and methodology. Missing metadata is unknown, not zero. Leaderboard facts were read from vendor pages on the stated date and can change. Vultax figures describe realised P&L over short windows for wallets observed by its pipeline and are not a forecast of any wallet's results. Nothing here identifies a wallet's operator, and nothing here is financial advice.
## Key figures
- Realised gains taken by the top 1% of winners: 43.9% — 36 wallets out of 9,902, 18 June to 14 July 2026; the top 10% of winners (351 wallets) took 79.5%
- Active June winners profitable again in July: 124 of 137 — 90.5% of the June winners among 184 wallets with ten or more trades in both months; 67.4% of the 184 were profitable in both. Across all wallets active in consecutive months from March 2025 to March 2026 (431 million fills, 13 month pairs), winners repeated 41–51% of the time
- One-trade wallets in profit: 12.2% — July 2026, n=2,199; against 63.7% for wallets with 6 to 20 trades
- Leaderboards that state fee treatment: 0 of 5 — Polymarket's board, Polycopy, Hashdive, Laika Labs, Polymarket Analytics: all show a P&L, none says gross or net
## The short answer
A small number of Polymarket wallets take most of the money, and the ones that trade often keep taking it. In Vultax's record of 9,902 wallets from 18 June to 14 July 2026, the top 1% of winning wallets, 36 addresses, took 43.9% of all realised gains, while 54.3% of wallets closed nothing at all.
Among the 184 wallets with ten or more trades in both June and July 2026, 124 of the 137 June winners were profitable again in July (90.5%). Across all wallets active in consecutive months from March 2025 to March 2026 (431 million fills, 13 month pairs), winners repeated 41–51% of the time — persistence is a property of the active few, not of winners in general. Activity is the first filter: in July, one-trade wallets were in profit 12.2% of the time, against 63.7% for wallets with six to twenty trades.
No leaderboard shows any of that. Polymarket's own board ranks by profit and volume with no definition of profit on the page, and none of the five boards compared here states whether its P&L is net of taker fees. The practical order: filter on activity, then read the rank, then find out how the rank was computed.
## What was measured
Vultax's prediction-market pipeline keeps, for every wallet it tracks, the realised profit and loss booked when the wallet sells, computed from its own cost basis, with trade counts and hit rates. Two readings are used here: 27,376 wallet-market records with closed trades between 18 June and 14 July 2026, covering 9,902 wallets and 2,147 markets, for where the money went; and the calendar months of June and July 2026, covering 9,949 wallets and 13,582 wallet-months, for whether one month's result predicts the next. A third, wider reading covers every wallet with a realised result in two consecutive months from March 2025 to March 2026 — 431 million fills across 13 month pairs — and is used only for the population-wide repeat rate.
Realised means closed by trading. A wallet that bought Yes at 40 cents and is still holding shows nothing, whether the market has since moved to 90 or to 5. This measures who took profits and losses off the table, not who was right.
## Activity is the first filter
In July, 7,178 wallets recorded at least one trade and 36.2% of them finished the month with a realised gain. That headline hides a steep gradient: 12.2% of one-trade wallets were profitable, against 63.7% of wallets with six to twenty trades and 65.9% of those with more than 100. June showed the same shape at a higher level, with 50.1% of 6,404 wallets profitable.
Part of this is measurement rather than skill: a one-trade wallet shows realised P&L only if it closed that position inside the month, and most are still holding. That is why leaderboards built on realised P&L favour active wallets, and why sample size has to sit next to rank before rank means anything.
### Share of wallets profitable in July 2026, by trades in the month
7,178 wallets. Activity is the first filter: one-trade wallets were profitable 12.2% of the time.
| Category | Profitable wallets (%) |
| --- | --- |
| 1 | 12.2 |
| 2–5 | 40.8 |
| 6–20 | 63.7 |
| 21–100 | 63.2 |
| 100+ | 65.9 |
[CSV](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.csv?dataset=section-activity-is-the-first-filter-chart) · [JSON](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.json?dataset=section-activity-is-the-first-filter-chart)
- 1 trade — 2,199 wallets, 12.2% profitable, mean hit rate 0.12
- 2–5 trades — 3,665 wallets, 40.8% profitable, hit rate 0.21
- 6–20 trades — 1,153 wallets, 63.7% profitable, hit rate 0.27
- 21–100 trades — 117 wallets, 63.2% profitable, hit rate 0.26
- 100+ trades — 44 wallets, 65.9% profitable, hit rate 0.26
## Most wallets closed nothing, and a few closed a lot
Of 9,902 wallets, 3,501 (35.4%) closed at least one position at a gain, 1,026 (10.4%) closed at a net loss, and 5,375 (54.3%) closed nothing at all. Among the winners, gains were steep. The top 1%, thirty-six wallets, took 43.9% of all realised gains. The top 10%, 351 wallets, took 79.5%. The hundred largest winners took 58.7%. One wallet alone booked $106,663, 13.6% of every realised dollar in the sample; the next four largest took $41,000, $14,310, $13,947 and $13,205.
The median wallet's realised P&L was zero; the 90th percentile was $75 and the 99th $1,212. Markets were concentrated too: the top 1% of markets, twenty-one of them, accounted for 43.8% of absolute realised P&L, and the single largest produced $107,156 of net realised P&L across 26 wallets, the great majority of it that one wallet's gain. Following a whale usually means following one wallet into one market.
### Share of all realised gains taken by the top wallets
9,902 wallets, 18 June to 14 July 2026. Gains total $783K.
| Category | Share of gains (%) |
| --- | --- |
| Top 1% of winners (36 wallets) | 43.9 |
| Top 100 wallets | 58.7 |
| Top 10% of winners (351 wallets) | 79.5 |
[CSV](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.csv?dataset=section-most-wallets-closed-nothing-and-a-few-closed-a-lot-chart) · [JSON](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.json?dataset=section-most-wallets-closed-nothing-and-a-few-closed-a-lot-chart)
## Losses are almost never realised
Realised gains in the window totalled $783,051. Realised losses totalled $15,371. The largest loss any wallet booked was $13,809, and the next largest was $264. Fifty-one dollars of gains were realised for every dollar of loss.
That ratio is not a statement about how often traders are right. It is the disposition effect, which Odean documented in 1998: investors realise gains far more readily than losses. A binary market amplifies it, because a losing position can simply be held to resolution and expire at zero without a sale ever being booked. The losses exist; they are taken by not trading.
## Breadth and results
Counted by markets over the same four weeks, the gradient is the same: wallets that traded a single market closed a gain 19.9% of the time (4,396 wallets), two or three markets 39.9% (3,444 wallets), four to ten 60.7% (1,875 wallets), and eleven or more 58.8% (187 wallets).
### Share of wallets with a realised gain, by markets traded
Breadth beats size: wallets across 4 to 10 markets closed a gain three times as often as one-market wallets.
| Category | Wallets with a gain (%) |
| --- | --- |
| 1 market | 19.9 |
| 2–3 | 39.9 |
| 4–10 | 60.7 |
| 11+ | 58.8 |
[CSV](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.csv?dataset=section-breadth-and-results-chart) · [JSON](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.json?dataset=section-breadth-and-results-chart)
## Do winners keep winning?
184 wallets traded ten or more times in both June and July 2026. Of those, 67.4% were profitable in both months and 23.9% unprofitable in both; 7.1% went from a profitable June to an unprofitable July, and 1.6% the other way. Read from June's side, 137 of the 184 were profitable in June (67.4% + 7.1% = 74.5%), and 124 of those 137, or 90.5%, were profitable again in July. The Spearman rank correlation between their June and July realised P&L was 0.83: where a wallet sat in the June ranking was a strong guide to where it sat in July.
That is the active cohort, and it is not the population. Across every wallet with a realised result in two consecutive months from March 2025 to March 2026 — 431 million fills over 13 month pairs — winners repeated 41–51% of the time. The ten-trade filter is doing the work: persistence is a property of the active few, not of winners in general.
At the very top the effect was stronger still. Of the 24 wallets in June's top decile by realised P&L among active wallets, 79.2% were in the top decile again in July and 87.5% were still profitable. Only 12.5% fell into the bottom half.
Two months is a short window and these are small groups. Carhart's classic study found that most mutual-fund performance persistence disappears within a year and is largely explained by momentum and fees; Mellers and colleagues found the top 2% of forecasters in tournaments kept their edge across years. Over eight weeks, this sample looks more like the forecasters.
## What profitable months look like
The dollars are modest. Among wallets with ten or more trades in a month, 275 in June and 444 in July, 66.2% and 65.8% were profitable. The median made $16 in June and $15 in July and the 99th percentile $6,825 and $6,356; total realised gains across these wallets were $150,000 and $250,000. This is a retail-scale cohort with a thin positive tail, not a room full of whales.
Hit rate separates the groups sharply. Among wallets with twenty or more trades in a month, those whose hit rate on closed positions was below 20% were profitable 27% of the time (n=152); between 20% and 40%, 96% (n=51); above 40%, 100% (n=97). Hit rate is itself shaped by which positions got closed, so this describes the sample, not a rule that a 20% hit rate guarantees a gain.
## The leaderboards, compared
Five public boards, scored on what they rank, whether they say how, and how often they move, read from each vendor's own pages on 5 September 2026.
### The leaderboards, compared
Verified 5 September 2026. Polycopy's page states "roughly 23%" of wallets with five or more resolved trades show positive lifetime realised P&L; that is the only population figure on any board and it agrees in shape with the Vultax measurement above.
| Board | Ranks by | Windows | Method stated? | Fees? | Refresh | Price |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Polymarket leaderboard](https://polymarket.com/leaderboard) (official) | "Profit/Loss" and "Volume" | Today, Weekly, Monthly, All | No definition on the page | Not stated | Live | Free |
| [Polycopy](https://polycopy.app/best-polymarket-traders) | "verified on-chain 30-day P&L", plus a Copy Score on "500K+ wallets tracked" | 30-day; monthly dated page (September 2026) | Partial: on-chain and window stated | Not stated | "Updated daily" | Free; Premium $30/mo for live copy bots |
| Hashdive | Proprietary Smart Score on wallets; whale participation | Not stated | No; vendor site blocked automated reading, third-party listings describe a -100 to 100 score | Not stated | Not stated | Freemium |
| Laika Labs | Leaderboard feeding a copy-trading product | Not stated | No; vendor site blocked automated reading | Not stated | Not stated | Free account per third-party guides |
| [Polymarket Analytics](https://polymarketanalytics.com/) | Market statistics and history; trader data | Not stated | No | Not stated | Not stated | Free |
| Vultax trader analytics | Measured trader sharpness across 8,082 profiled wallets and 5.2M+ performance snapshots | Rolling windows | Yes, with sample-size and basis-gap caveats rendered beside every rank | Stated per view | Continuous | Free to browse; paid plans on [pricing](https://vultax.com/pricing) |
[CSV](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.csv?dataset=section-the-leaderboards-compared-table) · [JSON](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards/data.json?dataset=section-the-leaderboards-compared-table)
## What a leaderboard cannot show you
Three things decide whether a top trader is worth following, and a rank contains none of them: activity, concentration and basis.
Activity and concentration are measured above. A quiet wallet at the top of a monthly board is usually one resolved position, not a strategy, and a $100,000 month from one market reads the same on a board as a $100,000 month from forty.
Basis. "Profit" on a board can be realised, marked to the current price, or both; it can be gross or net of Polymarket's taker fee, which is C × feeRate × p × (1 − p) with feeRate 0.04 to 0.07 on most categories ([fee docs](https://docs.polymarket.com/trading/fees.md)). None of the five boards says which. Two traders with the same displayed number can be in different businesses.
## How to read any board
A checklist that turns a rank into a decision. The same checks apply in Vultax's trader analytics, which keeps the sample and the time window beside each wallet's observed performance.
- Trade count first - discard wallets with fewer than ten trades in the window; the persistence evidence lives above that line.
- Window second - a 30-day rank is a snapshot; check the same wallet on the all-time view and on last month's dated page where one exists (Polycopy keeps them).
- Category third - specialists persist better than generalists; Polycopy's Copy Score and the Vultax category profiles both exist for this reason.
- Basis last - if the board does not say realised or marked, gross or net, assume the most flattering combination and discount accordingly.
- Never copy a rank - copying pays your lag, the taker fee and the fill the leader just moved; the [copy-trading study](https://vultax.com/research/polymarket-copy-trading-costs-and-tools) measures that cost, and Polycopy's free paper-trading bots let you test a wallet for a month first.
## How to read the live figures
The strip at the top of this page is rewritten every ten minutes from Polymarket's public leaderboard by day, week and month, its data API's trades of $10,000 or more, its global open interest, and Vultax's record of every fill it observes, including the always-on wallet cohort. The Vi IQ beneath it scores the six domains the Vultax terminal scores for a pair, computed for this page's subject from published inputs, with a domain that cannot be computed shown as unavailable rather than filled in. The figures in the body of the article are the measurement it was written on and are dated; the strip is what the same measurement says now.
The four figures are the top wallet's profit over the last seven and thirty days, the ten best wallets' combined seven-day profit, and the share of the top twenty-five's profit the top ten took. Polymarket's weekly board resets on Monday at 00:00 UTC, so the seven-day figure is small early in the week and the thirty-day one is the steadier reference; names are the public display names the venue itself shows.
## Context from elsewhere
The population behind every leaderboard changed in 2026. Polymarket opened a U.S. exchange in December 2025 and launched perpetual futures with up to 20x leverage on 3 September; Kalshi's contract volume reached about 90% of the pair's combined total in late August on sports and combos, and August was the first monthly decline in a year after the World Cup summer. A leaderboard that counts profit in dollars ranks a different crowd each season.
Two findings from outside this site should sit next to any ranking. Columbia researchers flagged about a quarter of Polymarket's volume over three years as wash trading, roughly one wallet in seven, many of them with no profit at all, which is what farming an airdrop or a ranking looks like. And the CFTC's February 2026 advisory cites a candidate who traded his own race and a video editor who traded on non-public channel information: some of the 'smart money' a tracker surfaces is money that knew.
## Method and limits
Board facts were read from each vendor's own pages on 5 September 2026. The Vultax figures are computed from public on-chain fills over two short windows and measure realised results only. Wallets present in both months are the ones that kept trading, which is a form of survivorship, and wallets enter the pipeline through leaderboard and activity discovery, so the sample leans toward visible, active traders. The wider March 2025 to March 2026 reading applies no activity filter, so it counts wallets with a single closed trade in each month; that is why its repeat rate sits well below the active cohort's.
Realised P&L depends on the pipeline's cost-basis accounting and excludes open positions (the 18 June to 14 July reading also excludes resolution payouts), so it will not match Polymarket's own profit figures. Wallet identifiers are public addresses; nothing here identifies a person, and nothing here is financial advice. Challenge a cell at research@vultax.com; material changes are logged in the [changelog](https://vultax.com/changelog).
- Profitable — realised P&L above zero in the month; open positions excluded
- Dataset — the activity and profitability table above is available as a CSV on this page
## Questions
### Who are the best Polymarket traders?
The live strip shows the venue's own leaderboard leaders by profit over a week and a month, refreshed every ten minutes. Read them with the trade count beside the rank: wallets that trade often are the ones whose results repeat, and no board says whether its profit is net of fees.
### How does the Polymarket leaderboard work?
It ranks public display names by realised profit or by volume over a day, a week, a month or all time; the weekly board resets on Monday. It does not show fees, open positions or how concentrated a wallet's profit is in one market.
### Who makes money on Polymarket?
A small number of wallets take most of the realised profit: from 18 June to 14 July 2026 the top 1% of winning wallets, 36 addresses, took 43.9% of realised gains, and 54.3% of wallets closed nothing. The live strip shows how concentrated the venue's own leaderboard is right now.
### Do profitable Polymarket traders stay profitable?
Among active wallets, mostly. Of 184 wallets with ten or more trades in both June and July 2026, 137 were profitable in June and 124 of them (90.5%) were profitable again in July; 67.4% of the 184 were profitable in both months. Across all wallets active in consecutive months from March 2025 to March 2026 (431 million fills, 13 month pairs), winners repeated 41–51% of the time. Persistence is a property of the active few, not of winners in general.
### Can I trust a leaderboard's volume ranking?
Less than its profit ranking. A 2025 Columbia study flagged about a quarter of Polymarket's volume as wash trading, and volume is what incentive-farming inflates; profit is harder to fake without losing money to yourself.
## Revision notes
- 2026-09-16: Now also covers where Polymarket's realised gains go and whether profitable wallets stay profitable month to month, with the wallet-level charts and data behind both.
- 2026-09-16: Adds the population-wide repeat rate beside the active-cohort figure.
## Sources and methodology
- [Polymarket leaderboard](https://polymarket.com/leaderboard) — Profit/Loss and Volume; four windows; no method; read 2026-09-05
- [Polycopy: Best Polymarket Traders (September 2026)](https://polycopy.app/best-polymarket-traders) — "verified on-chain 30-day P&L", the 23% baseline; read 2026-09-05
- [Polymarket trading fees](https://docs.polymarket.com/trading/fees.md) — Taker fee formula and rates
- [Polymarket documentation](https://docs.polymarket.com/) — Public data endpoints from which trades and positions are observed
- [Vultax prediction desk — wallet statistics and coverage](https://vultax.com/features/prediction-desk) — How wallets are discovered and how monthly realised P&L, hit rate and sample size are computed and shown
- [Vultax methodology](https://vultax.com/methodology) — Population separation, freshness and the explicit-coverage standard applied to prediction data
- [Vultax: Best Polymarket Tools in 2026](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-tools-2026) — The full comparison
- [Finance Magnates — Polymarket rolls out U.S. app after CFTC green light, starting with sports](https://www.financemagnates.com/forex/polymarket-rolls-out-us-mobile-app-after-cftc-green-light-starting-with-sports-events/) — Polymarket US launched 2 December 2025 on the QCEX designation acquired for $112 million; the invite waitlist was removed in May 2026; iOS only at the time of writing.
- [Coinpaprika — Polymarket expands beyond prediction markets with 20x leverage perps (Sep 2026)](https://coinpaprika.com/news/polymarket-expands-beyond-prediction-markets/) — Perpetual futures launched 3 September 2026 with up to 20x leverage; 67 markets within hours; U.S. traders barred. Kalshi's bitcoin perpetuals went live 3 June 2026.
- [DefiRate — Prediction markets top $11B in contract volume as sports, combos drive Kalshi growth (week of 24–30 Aug 2026)](https://defirate.com/news/volume-report-top-11b-contracts-sports-combos/) — Kalshi at about 90% of combined contract volume in late August, driven by sports and multi-leg combos; the share is contract volume, not dollars at risk.
- [The Crypto Basic — Kalshi, Polymarket August volume drops 14.5% in first monthly decline in a year (2 Sep 2026)](https://thecryptobasic.com/2026/09/02/kalshi-polymarket-august-volume-drops-14-5-in-first-monthly-decline-in-a-year/) — August 2026 was the first monthly decline in a year after the World Cup; Polymarket's August volume about $8.2 billion, down about 37% from July.
- [Gizmodo — Study finds around a quarter of Polymarket trades are fake (Columbia, Nov 2025)](https://gizmodo.com/study-finds-around-a-quarter-of-polymarket-trades-are-fake-2000683231) — About 25% of Polymarket volume over three years flagged as wash trading by counterparty structure, peaking near 60% in December 2024; roughly one wallet in seven flagged; many flagged wallets made no profit.
- [CFTC — Enforcement Division issues Prediction Markets Advisory (25 Feb 2026)](https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9185-26) — Insider trading, fraud and manipulation, wash sales and pre-arranged trading, and disruptive trading named as conduct the Commission polices on any designated contract market; cites a candidate trading his own race and a video editor trading on non-public channel information.
- [Carhart, M. M. (1997). On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance. Journal of Finance 52(1)](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1997.tb03808.x) — The benchmark finding that fund performance persistence is short-lived and mostly explained by momentum and costs
- [Mellers, B. et al. (2015). Identifying and Cultivating Superforecasters as a Method of Improving Probabilistic Predictions. Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(3)](https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615577794) — Evidence that a small top group of forecasters keeps its edge over time
- [Barber, B. M., Odean, T. (2000). Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth. Journal of Finance 55(2)](https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-1082.00226) — Why activity and outcomes are entangled in retail trading records
- [Odean, T. (1998). Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses? Journal of Finance 53(5)](https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-1082.00072) — The disposition effect: gains are realised readily, losses are held
- [Wolfers, J., Zitzewitz, E. (2004). Prediction Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives 18(2)](https://doi.org/10.1257/0895330041371321) — How prediction-market prices aggregate information and who supplies liquidity
Changing market context is available on the [article page](https://vultax.com/research/best-polymarket-traders-leaderboards). It is separate from the published study exported here.