Where Polymarket Profits Go: 36 Wallets Took 44% of the Gains

For every wallet it tracks, Vultax's prediction-market pipeline keeps a realised P&L per market: the gain or loss booked when the wallet sold, computed from its own cost basis. This study takes the 27,376 wallet-market records with closed trades between 18 June and 14 July 2026, covering 9,902 wallets and 2,147 Polymarket markets, and asks where the money went.

One definition drives everything: realised means closed by trading. A wallet that bought Yes at 40 cents and is still holding shows nothing here, 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.

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. That is the shape of a market where most participants are small, most positions are held to resolution, and a small number of wallets trade in size and take profits actively.

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 in a prediction market: Odean showed in 1998 that investors realise gains far more readily than losses, holding losing positions in the hope they recover. Here the effect is amplified by the product, because a losing position in a binary market 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.

Wallets that traded a single market in the window closed a gain 19.9% of the time (4,396 wallets). Those active in two or three markets, 39.9% (3,444 wallets). Four to ten markets, 60.7% (1,875 wallets). Eleven or more, 58.8% (187 wallets). As in our persistence study, breadth of activity tracks realised profitability closely, partly because active wallets are the ones that close positions at all.

Realised P&L was concentrated in markets as well as wallets. The ten markets with the largest absolute realised P&L accounted for 33.2% of the total, and the top 1% of markets, twenty-one of them, for 43.8%. The single largest market produced $107,156 of net realised P&L across 26 wallets, the great majority of it that one wallet's gain. Following a whale, in other words, usually means following one wallet into one market.

Size tells you a wallet can move a thin market; it does not tell you it was right. The useful questions are how many markets it has closed, whether its gains come from many positions or one, and whether it realises losses at all. The Vultax prediction desk, in preview, shows those counts beside each wallet rather than a single P&L figure, so a $100,000 month from one market and a $100,000 month from forty read as the different things they are.

Realised P&L depends on the pipeline's cost-basis accounting and excludes resolution payouts and open positions, so it will not match Polymarket's own profit figures, which include them. The window is four weeks. Wallets enter the sample through activity and leaderboard discovery, which leans toward visible traders. Wallet identifiers are public addresses; nothing here identifies a person, and nothing here is a recommendation to follow any wallet.

• Window — closed trades from 2026-06-18 to 2026-07-14
• Realised — booked by selling; holding to resolution is not counted
• Dataset — wallet buckets by breadth and profitability are available as a CSV on this page