Original Title: The Best Traders on Polymarket
Original Author: Kiyotaka
Original Translator: SpecialistXBT, BlockBeats
Editor's Note: In the crypto market, profit is the report card. This article explores the on-chain data of leading wallets on Polymarket to see if the big winners in the prediction market rely on information asymmetry, modeling, belief, or pure trading discipline. The conclusion is that there is no universal strategy for consistently making substantial profits; the top three well-known accounts employ three almost entirely separate ways of making money.
After studying the wallets that have earned millions of dollars in the world's largest prediction market, one finds that there isn't a unified strategy; instead, there are at least three, and they have almost no common points.
If you frequently browse Twitter in the prediction market circle, you will quickly see the same batch of anonymous IDs in various "biggest winners" list posts. Theo4 made a fortune in the 2024 election market. swisstony quietly continues to yield profits in NBA markets. MonsieurDimanche almost always appears in the comments section of various markets. Over time, you start to wonder: Are these people of the same kind? Are they doing the same set of things? Is there some identifiable profile for those "good at Polymarket"?
The intuitive answer is: Yes. Just like you would think that "people good at poker" also have some common characteristics: patience, mathematical ability...
However, after reviewing the on-chain data of all Top 20 wallets on the platform, the real answer is: there is no such unified profile. There are at least three categories, and perhaps even more. Aside from appearing on the leaderboard, they have almost no commonalities. This answer is more interesting than expected, so it is worth breaking down the data to see what it truly indicates.
The data below comes from Polymarket, up to May 5. The top 10 wallets in political markets alone contributed $94 million in profit; the top 10 wallets in sports markets contributed another $60 million; and the third-largest category, Crypto, contributed $25 million. This number is even less than the total of the top three wallets in political markets.
Political Markets Are on Another Level
Comparing the top wallets across categories in the same dollar scale, the political category, whether looking at peak profits of individual wallets or total profits of the Top 10 wallets, stands out clearly ahead.
The top political wallet has already made $22 million. The top wallet in sports has made $11.3 million. The top wallet in Crypto has made $4.7 million. Unfortunately, this number does not even qualify for the top 10 in political markets.
This disparity is not an illusion caused by a power-law distribution. The 10th political wallet has about $5 million in profits, surpassing the top wallet in all other categories besides sports. Political markets are not "just a steeper distribution"; they operate on completely different levels.
If we plot the total profits of the Top 20 wallets across categories on a logarithmic scale, aside from the three main categories of politics, sports, and Crypto, only the top wallets in Science and "Other" exceed $1 million.
The most straightforward explanation is: political markets have fewer occurrences, larger bet sizes, and longer settlement times. A correct judgment on the outcome of a presidential election or controversial policy can translate into seven or even eight-figure profits. Sports markets typically settle within hours, have thinner spreads, and yield smaller individual profits. The market structure determines which strategies can succeed.
High-Belief Heavy Bets vs. High-Frequency Multi-Market Trading
Looking at the number of positions held in relation to realized profits, the leaderboard divides clearly into two groups. They share one vertical axis, but otherwise have almost no commonalities.
A comparison chart showing the number of positions and trading profits of the Top 10 wallets in political, sports, and Crypto categories reveals that the political whales cluster at the low position count end, while sports whales dominate the high-frequency trading end.
On the left side of the chart, between about 1 and 100 positions, the political whales are nearly filled. The top wallet 0x5668…5839 earned $22 million using only 18 positions. Another wallet 0xd235…0f29 made $11.3 million with just 2 positions.
On the right side of the chart, between 1,000 and 150,000 positions, is the territory of sports traders. The second sports wallet 0x204f…5e14 earned $7.5 million with 151,888 positions. This resembles the marks of an automated system rather than that of a "viewpoint investor."
One wallet earned $22 million with 18 positions. Another bagged $7.5 million with 151,888 positions. They are on the same leaderboard but they are not doing the same business.
This represents two completely different approaches. The first requires strong judgment and the willingness to heavily bet on rare high-risk events. The second demands engineering discipline: a model with very thin single profits deployed across enough markets to allow the law of large numbers to take effect. Crypto lies between the two, exhibiting both styles, but operating at a smaller absolute scale.
Market Choice: Concentration and Diversification Coexist
Introducing 8 named wallets, which are identifiable accounts from publicly available data on Polymarket, provides a more direct view of the strategy distribution.
Sorting these 8 wallets by "proportion of largest category profits to total profits," Theo4 is completely concentrated in politics, while MonsieurDimanche spans 9 categories.
Theo4’s $22 million profit comes entirely from political markets. swisstony’s $7.8 million profit comes 97% from sports. The earnings of the number one sports trader kch123 also come 87% from sports. These are expert traders who do not easily cross over to different areas.
On the other end, MonsieurDimanche distributes his $15 million profit across 9 categories, with no single category contributing more than 31%. He doesn't focus on any one category, yet still sits at the top of the leaderboard.
Conventional wisdom suggests that specialization brings deeper advantages, leading to higher returns. This judgment does hold at the top, but only barely. Theo4 is the wallet with the most concentrated earnings in named wallets and ranks first in total profit. MonsieurDimanche is the most diversified yet ranks second.
Position Quantity vs. Single Trade Profit
The most useful graph in the entire dataset is one that divides each wallet's profit by its number of positions, measuring how much each bet earns on average.
On the logarithmic chart of trading profit/position number, both Theo4 and swisstony are almost 100% concentrated in a single category, but they differ by a factor of about 22,000 in selectivity.
Theo4 earns an average of $1 million per position. swisstony earns an average of $45 per position. Both are essentially single-category traders and are nearly indistinguishable on the "concentration" axis. However, on the "selectivity" axis, they differ by about 22,000 times.
This is the most important analytical conclusion: the number of positions and the profit per trade are two independent variables. Mixing them obscures what the leaderboard truly reveals. Which market categories a wallet covers points to where the trader bets; how much profit per unit corresponds to how many positions indicates how the trader makes money. The two are not related.
Three Strategies Behind Eight-Figure Profits
The data presents not a single strategy, but three.
The first is the political expert. In slow-settling, high-odds, consequential political markets, substantial returns are garnered through a few high-belief, high-amount positions. Fewer trades but larger positions and deeper research characterize this approach. Theo4 is a typical representative. The threshold for this strategy is primarily psychological: most traders cannot scale their positions to a level that genuinely yields returns from the strategy. It is not a path that can be scaled in the traditional sense.
The second is the systematic trader in sports markets. By pricing sports markets with automated models, even a slight edge over consensus prices can accumulate profits across thousands or even tens of thousands of contracts. The profits per trade are thin, yet collectively, the approach can persist long-term. swisstony is a typical representative. This strategy's threshold is about engineering capability and operational discipline, rather than mere market insight.
The third is the cross-category generalist. Able to form well-calibrated judgments across many themes and extract profits in markets overlooked by expert traders. MonsieurDimanche is a typical representative. The threshold for this strategy is breadth of knowledge, which is harder to attain than establishing a single-category model.
These skills do not interconnect. A political expert will not become a systematic sports trader simply by trading more frequently because his strengths do not lie there. A systematic sports trader will not convert into a political expert by increasing single position sizes since his single profits are too thin to support highly concentrated positions. The prediction market rewards three distinct abilities. Excelling in one does not imply proficiency in others.
This is, in a sense, reassuring. "How to make money on Polymarket?" has no singular answer. There are at least three answers. Which one is the hardest for a particular individual depends on their personality, engineering skills, and how many high-quality views they can formulate on various matters. These differences will not be erased by the leaderboard.
What the leaderboard seems to truly penalize is the middle ground: those who have enough breadth that they dilute specialization and enough trading volume that they dilute conviction. That is where most people might find themselves. The wallets at the top have chosen a path to deepen their expertise and maintain sufficient discipline to remain on that path.
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