winning-wallet-finder_github/README.md

Polymarket Smart Money

Finds Polymarket wallets that win more than 75% of their resolved bets and bet multiple times per week — the "smart money" worth watching.

Zero dependencies. One file, Python 3 stdlib only.

Run the dashboard

python3 smart_money.py

Open http://localhost:8899, hit Scan, and wait a minute or two. Adjust the filters (win rate, bets/week, minimum resolved bets, candidate pool size) and the table updates live while the scan runs. Click any trader to see their recent resolved bets and a link to their Polymarket profile.

Run in the terminal

python3 smart_money.py --scan            # default 150-wallet pool
python3 smart_money.py --scan --pool 300 # broader sweep

How it works

1. Candidates — pulls the 7d, 30d, and all-time leaderboards from data-api.polymarket.com/v1/leaderboard and dedupes into a candidate pool (default 150 wallets).
2. True win rate — over resolved bets in the last 90 days. This is the subtle part: Polymarket only redeems winning shares, so /closed-positions (redeemed or sold) is heavily survivorship-biased toward winners — losing shares are worth $0 and sit unredeemed in /positions at curPrice 0 forever. A correct win rate has to union both endpoints over the same window. Counting only /closed-positions (the naive approach) reports ~90% for wallets whose real hit rate is ~50%.
3. Frequency — counts trades from /activity over the last 4 weeks; bets/week is the number of distinct markets traded per week, so 50 fills on one order don't count as 50 bets.
4. Filter — keeps wallets with win rate ≥ 75%, ≥ 2 bets/week, and ≥ 10 resolved bets.

Reality check: with the unbiased metric, essentially no top wallet wins 75% of its bets — true rates cluster around 49% (a coin flip), max ~60%. The profitable ones make money through position sizing and entry prices, not hit rate. Treat a high win rate as a red flag for a bias bug, not a green light. See the backtest below.

Copy-trading (copytrade.py)

Once you've found wallets worth following, copytrade.py watches them and mirrors their trades onto your own account.

• Sizing — each fresh entry stakes a fixed % of your bankroll (default 2%).
• Mirror — copies entries and exits: when they add, it adds proportionally; when they sell part of a position, it sells the same fraction of yours.
• Price guard — skips a copy if the market has moved >5% from their fill price, so you don't chase.
• No backfill — only copies positions they open after you start watching; positions they already held are tracked (so exits still mirror) but never opened.
• Per-position cap — max_position_usd caps total cost in any one market. Without it, proportional adds let a single position balloon toward your whole exposure limit as the whale piles in (a backtest caught exactly this).
• Discord alerts — set discord_webhook in the config to get a ping on every trade it would place (entries green, exits red).

Backtesting (backtest.py)

Replays a watchlist's real trades over a recent window through the same copy logic, filling at each wallet's actual historical price and marking outcomes from how markets resolved.

python3 backtest.py --days 7

A 7-day backtest of four top wallets returned −48% on deployed capital — not because the engine is broken, but because the wallets' true entry hit rate is ~50% and flat-size copying pays the spread on every coin flip. Copying a profitable wallet's entries does not reproduce its edge, which lives in sizing and entry prices. Backtest before you fund anything.

⚠️ Real money — read this

It runs in PAPER mode by default and places nothing — it just logs what it would do. Live trading requires all of: "mode": "live" in the config, the --live flag, typing a confirmation phrase, and py-clob-client with valid credentials. Hard caps (per-trade, daily spend, total exposure, open positions, price bounds) apply in both modes. In live mode this places real orders with real money on your account — you own the config and the outcomes.

python3 copytrade.py --init      # write config.example.json
cp config.example.json config.json
#  ... edit config.json: add wallets to "watchlist", set bankroll & caps ...
python3 copytrade.py             # PAPER mode — safe, logs only
python3 copytrade.py --once      # single polling pass, then exit

Going live (only after you trust the paper output):

pip install py-clob-client
#  set "mode": "live" and fill in the "live" block (private_key, funder_address)
python3 copytrade.py --live      # prompts for a typed confirmation

config.json and copytrade_state.json are gitignored so your credentials and runtime state never get committed.

Caveats

• Candidates come from the leaderboards, so this surfaces profitable sharps. A high-win-rate wallet that has never cracked any leaderboard window won't appear — scanning every wallet on the platform isn't feasible via the public API.
• Win rate is measured over resolved bets in the last 90 days, not all history.
• Win rate ≠ EV. Wallets with positive all-time leaderboard PnL routinely show ~50% true win rates and even negative 90-day realized PnL. Following a wallet profitably is about how it sizes and prices entries, not how often it's right. The realized_pnl column is position-level over 90 days and is not comparable to the all-time leaderboard figure.
• Very high-volume / market-maker wallets (thousands of fills) can't be cleanly backtested via the public API — too many fills, no historical position snapshot.