Docs

Scores and badges

Three numbers follow wallets around Polywhaler: a trader-quality badge, an insider score on individual trades, and a smart money score on the wallet itself. They measure different things and are easy to confuse.

Trader quality badges#

The badge on a trade card answers one question: has this wallet earned a place on the leaderboard, and how high?

  • Top 100: inside the first hundred ranked wallets.
  • Top 1000: ranked, and comfortably inside the first thousand.
  • Ranked: on the leaderboard, further down.
  • Provisional: too few decisive closed positions for the score to mean much yet. Treat it as "not enough evidence" rather than as a weak result.

The same thresholds drive the trader-quality filter on the feed and the quality filters in the API, so a feed view and an API query agree.

Insider score#

The insider score is attached to a trade, not a wallet, and runs 0 to 100. It blends the timing against the market's resolution date, the price impact, the conviction implied by size at those odds, and what the wallet has done before.

  • Low: 40 and under.
  • Medium: above 40, up to 70.
  • High: above 70.

The bands are strict, so a score of exactly 40 is low and exactly 70 is medium. Every badge, filter and alert classifies through the same function, which is why an alert set to "high" and a badge reading "high" always mean the same thing.

Note

A high insider score is not an accusation. It says the trade is unusual given what was knowable at the time. The Vindicated feed is where those guesses get marked.

Smart money score#

The smart money score is attached to a wallet, and it is the leaderboard's ranking number. It is centred rather than cumulative:

  • 50 means no demonstrated edge. Not bad, just unproven.
  • Above 50 is evidence of skill, below 50 is evidence against it.
  • How far from 50 a wallet lands depends on both how good the record looks and how much of it there is, so confidence moves the score in both directions.

What goes into it#

  • Return on investment, weighted most heavily.
  • Realized profit and loss.
  • Calibration: when this wallet buys at 20%, does that outcome happen about a fifth of the time?
  • Consistency across positions rather than one enormous win.
  • Conviction, meaning whether size tracks their own hit rate.

Scores are smoothed over a week, and a wallet with fewer than ten decisive closed positions is marked provisional instead of ranked.

Why volume is not an input#

This is the most important thing on the page. Trading volume is trivially washable: a wallet can trade against itself all day and manufacture an enormous number. Any ranking that rewards volume rewards that behaviour, so volume is deliberately left out, and wallet age is replaced by the span between a wallet's first and last trade.

The same reasoning killed the previous version of the score, which could be farmed by repeatedly backing heavy favourites for a high win rate and almost no profit.

Which one to use#

  • Judging a single trade you just saw: insider score.
  • Deciding whether to follow a wallet: smart money score, and check it is not provisional.
  • Skimming a feed: the badge, which is the smart money score compressed into something readable at a glance.