Terms used on PolyTrace

Tracked subset

The public Polymarket fills worth $1K+ that PolyTrace’s live collector received and retained. It is not Polymarket’s complete trade history or a wallet’s complete account activity.

Whale trade

A single Polymarket fill worth $1K+. The threshold applies per trade, not to a position accumulated over several trades, and it is a fixed dollar amount rather than a percentile of current activity.

Decided position

A position that resolved one way or the other inside the 90-day measurement window. Positions still open in unsettled markets are undecided and excluded; positions that came out exactly even are dropped from the sample rather than counted as losses. Settlement decides a position, not redemption: a losing position the trader left unredeemed is decided and counts as a loss.

Win rate

The share of decided positions that made money, measured over the trailing 90 days. Losing positions held through settlement are in the denominator whether or not the trader ever redeemed them, so the rate cannot be flattered by leaving losers on the books. Withheld entirely for wallets with fewer than 20 decided positions rather than shown as zero or as a raw fraction. A wallet whose results have not been measured yet shows no win rate either, and that is a different statement from a small sample (#1570).

Recent position ROI

PnL across decided positions in the current 90-day source window divided by their total cost basis. PolyTrace publishes it only with at least 10 decided positions, a source refresh that is current and fresh, and a positive cost basis for every position. It is historical evidence, not a forecast.

Open exposure

The wallet’s still-unsettled positions: how many there are, and what share of their unrealised move is against the wallet. The share divides the absolute value of the unrealised losses by the absolute value of every unrealised gain and loss, so 28% means just over a quarter of the open swing is underwater; it is withheld when nothing has moved either way. It is measured from one position snapshot, whose time is published beside it, and it is a statement about the snapshot, not a prediction of how those positions settle.

Smart money

A wallet PolyTrace tags as having traded more than $100,000 in volume, with a win rate above 55%, and profitable overall. The tag describes a measured record, not a reputation or an identity.

Whale (tag)

A wallet with more than $1M in lifetime Polymarket volume. The tag describes size only — a whale can be losing money. Distinct from a whale trade, which describes a single fill.

Proxy wallet

The address Polymarket exposes publicly for a trader, and the address PolyTrace profiles key on. It is not necessarily the owner’s main wallet, and one person may control several without PolyTrace linking them.

Event

A Polymarket prediction market as listed on the site, such as “Fed decision in July?”. One event contains one or more markets, and each market has two or more outcome tokens.

Outcome token

The tradeable share for one result of a market. A binary market has two (Yes and No); a categorical market has one per candidate outcome. A winning share redeems at $1 and a losing one at $0, which is how a decided position is scored.

Outcome direction

The economic result a fill moves toward or against after combining its BUY/SELL side with the traded Outcome token. BUY or SELL alone is not a prediction direction: buying No and selling Yes can express the same view.

Aligned trading flow

Several eligible wallets produced trades with the same economic Outcome direction. This can include buying that Outcome or selling the opposing Outcome, so aligned flow does not by itself prove that the wallets opened the same bet.

Signal event

A bounded cluster of eligible directional fills that passes at least one published ranking rule. It carries its reason, independent-wallet count, concentration, opposing evidence, baseline, coverage, freshness, and links to underlying fills; it is not a recommendation or execution claim.

Independent wallet

One eligible Polymarket proxy wallet counted once inside a signal window after its related fills are grouped. The count measures distinct observed addresses, not verified people or statistically independent owners.

Category evidence

A proxy wallet’s decided-position results and current exposure for one named Category, with their own 90-day window, sample, coverage, and freshness. The 90-day window is a ceiling: the Polymarket position source stops paginating for the deepest wallets, so the actual window is bounded by that limit and the coverage start published with the dataset is authoritative. Global PnL, global win rate, or activity volume does not fill a missing Category result.

Evidence state

The publishing status attached to a dataset: partial means some required coverage is missing; stale retains an aged last-good snapshot; unavailable means the source or gate cannot support a value; unmapped means a fact could not be linked to the required entity or Category. None of these states means zero. A dataset whose window was cut short by a source pagination limit is not partial — it is complete over the shorter window its coverage start reports.

Smart money flow

The net direction of whale trades on a market over a stated window: how much capital from wallets that are profitable overall bought a given outcome, minus how much they sold. The bar here is lifetime profit above zero — a lower bar than the smart money tag, which additionally requires volume and a win rate. Always read the flow with its window; the same market can show opposite flow over 24 hours and 7 days.

How these are computed, and what they cannot tell you, is set out in the methodology.