Methodology

Records are read from Polymarket, a prediction market where positions settle on a public ledger. Nothing is self-reported. A record is a wallet address, and because settlement is public, a losing position cannot be quietly removed after the fact.

Anyone can look up any wallet without an account, because the underlying data is public regardless. Claiming a wallet as yours is a separate step and requires proving you control it.

A sportsbook bet is atomic: one stake, one price, one result. A prediction market position is a trading record — you can add to it, trim it, or exit before the event happens. We resolve that with two units rather than forcing one.

Fill. One trade at one price and one moment. This is the unit for closing line value.

Position. Every fill on one outcome, netted together. Cost basis is the volume-weighted average of the buys. This is the unit for profit and loss.

We publish two records from these. The settlement record counts only positions held to resolution, and gives wins, losses and pushes. The trading return covers every position including early exits. Showing both tells you whether you are looking at someone who picks or someone who trades — genuinely different behaviour, and worth knowing before you follow either.

Market makers are the single largest data-quality risk in this dataset. Providing two-sided liquidity generates thousands of near-zero-edge trades, and across that many observations noise alone will make someone look either brilliant or hopeless.

We classify every fill as maker or taker directly from the exchange, and exclude any wallet whose fills are 30% or more market making. This matters more than it sounds: the top of Polymarket’s own sports leaderboard is heavily populated by market makers, because that leaderboard sorts on profit and volume.

We also exclude wallets trading at a cadence no human handicapper could sustain. Above roughly 400 fills a day, a wallet is running an algorithm, and a statistic computed over its trades measures execution speed rather than judgement about games.

A wallet is ranked only if it clears every one of these:

A wallet below these thresholds is still visible and its record is still complete. It simply is not enough evidence to rank, and we would rather say so than publish a number that will not hold.

Raw return over a small sample is close to meaningless. We pull each wallet’s return toward the population average in proportion to how little data supports it:

adjusted = (n × raw + k × μ) / (n + k)

n is the number of settled positions, μ is the population mean return computed from the eligible set each run, and k is 200. The practical effect: +40% over 12 positions ranks below +8% over 400, which is the correct ordering and the opposite of what an unadjusted leaderboard shows.

Closing line value measures whether the price moved in your favour after you traded. It is the earliest honest evidence that a decision was good, and it stabilises far faster than returns — which is why it carries the most weight of any single input.

buy at p, close at c   →   clv = c / p − 1
sell at p, close at c  →   clv = (1 − c) / (1 − p) − 1

The sell case uses the complement because selling one side is economically buying the other. On a prediction market the price is the implied probability and fees run roughly 0.8–1.5%, so unlike a sportsbook line there is no vig to strip out first.

Fills made at or after the event start receive no CLV — there is no closing line value on an in-play trade. Markets with no price observation near the close are left blank rather than estimated.

Each input is converted to a percentile within the eligible population, then weighted:

No single position may contribute more than 2% of a wallet’s ranked exposure, so one enormous winner cannot carry an otherwise ordinary record.

The t-statistic is used but never displayed. It is an input to an ordering, not a number that means anything on its own to a reader, and publishing it would invite exactly the kind of decontextualised comparison the rest of this page exists to prevent.

• Ranking cannot be bought. Composite score is the only ordering, and there is no override anywhere in the product. If we ever sell placement it will live in its own labelled section, separate from the ranking.
• No star ratings and no written reviews. Quality here is objectively measurable, so subjective reviews would only let popularity contaminate it.
• No streaks, no hot badges, no trending-on-recent-wins. Recency bias is what this engine exists to remove; the interface cannot reintroduce it.
• No money from any venue. No affiliate deals, no referral revenue, no partnerships with any sportsbook, exchange or prediction market — including Polymarket.

Stating these plainly is part of the method, not a disclaimer bolted onto it.

• Coverage is Polymarket only. Someone who trades exclusively at sportsbooks will not appear here at all, and their absence says nothing about them.
• A wallet is one wallet. Someone trading across several could present a partial picture, so profiles disclose how many wallets are linked.
• Closing line value is unavailable for in-play fills and for markets without a price near the close. Those fills are excluded from the figure rather than estimated.
• Negative-risk markets link outcomes across an event in a way that makes naive profit-and-loss wrong. They are flagged and excluded until handled properly.
• Past performance does not predict future results. A high rank means the evidence of skill is strong relative to others measured the same way. It is not a forecast, and it is not advice.