Terms used on PolyTrace

Whale trade

A single Polymarket fill worth $1,000 or more. 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 180-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.

Win rate

The share of decided positions that made money, measured over the trailing 180 days. Withheld entirely for wallets with fewer than 20 decided positions rather than shown as zero or as a raw fraction.

Shrinkage

Pulling a win rate toward 50% in proportion to how little evidence backs it, by mixing 20 hypothetical coin flips into the record before scoring. Three wins from three positions becomes 56.5%; 500 from 500 stays 98%. It applies to the PolyTrace Score, not to the win rate displayed on a profile.

PolyTrace Score

A 0–100 rating combining profitability (35%), skill (30%), breadth (20%), and recency (15%) on absolute rather than percentile scales. Wallets without a trustworthy win rate are unrated rather than scored low.

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.

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.