Polymarket publishes a leaderboard. It also publishes every wallet's positions. Nobody joins the two, so I did — with a scraper that hits the public data-api (no login, no key) and writes one flat row per whale position.
Here is what the top 25 traders by 30-day PnL were holding this morning (September 4, 2026).
The headline numbers
- 25 traders, $2.03M combined 30-day profit. Median $61.5k. #1 (Sassy-Bucket) made $206k on only $203k of volume — a ~100% return; #3 (BrotherObama) needed $548k of volume for $176k.
- 318 open positions worth $7.53M, sitting on $980k of unrealized profit. 188 of 318 (59%) are currently green.
- Average entry price 0.55, average current price 0.60. They buy at coin-flip odds and hold while the market drifts their way.
- Median time to resolution: 60 days. Only 28% of positions resolve within a week. These are not scalpers.
Where the money actually is
| Category | Positions | Current value |
|---|---|---|
| Crypto price levels ("Will BTC dip to $X by Dec 31?") | 69 | $4.50M |
| Macro (Fed rate decisions) | 16 | $1.11M |
| Sports (MLB O/U, US Open tennis) | 44 | $0.52M |
| Politics / legislation | 41 | $0.17M |
| Everything else | 148 | $1.24M |
One wallet (JnStrtPrdctnMrkts) owns the five largest positions on the board — all of them "No" on Bitcoin/Ethereum dip markets: "ETH dips to $1,500 by Dec 31" No at $865k (entered 0.62, now 0.86, +$242k), "BTC dips to $55k" No at $589k (+$209k), "$50k" No at $552k, "$45k" No at $391k, "ETH $1,250" No at $370k. That is a $2.8M ladder betting that crypto simply does not crash this year, bought when the market priced the crash at 25–45%.
The most crowded trades
Markets where several whales independently hold the same side are the closest thing to a consensus signal:
- "No change in Fed rates after the September 2026 meeting" — 5 of 25 whales, all Yes, $749k. Plus 3 whales on "No" to a 25 bps hike ($309k). The smart-money book is unanimous: nothing happens in September.
- "Clarity Act (H.R.3633) signed into law in 2026?" — 3 whales, all Yes, $108k.
- Sports are where they disagree: Giants–Pirates O/U 8.5 has 2 whales Over and 2 Under. Struff–Cerundolo at the US Open: 3 on Cerundolo, 2 on Struff. Sports positions are small ($5–30k) and short-dated — this looks like edge-hunting, not conviction.
What this is useful for
-
Copy-trading feeds: schedule the scraper hourly, diff
conditionId + walletagainst the previous run, and you get "whale opened / closed a position" alerts. - Sentiment on macro & crypto: whale positioning on Fed and BTC-level markets moves before the retail price does; this is the cheapest way to watch it.
-
Research: the
avgPricevscurPricecolumns give you each whale's entry, so you can measure who's early and who's chasing.
How it's built
Two public endpoints: GET /v1/leaderboard?window=1m&rankType=pnl&limit=25 for the roster and GET /positions?user=<wallet>&limit=100&sortBy=CURRENT per wallet. Pure HTTP, ~25 requests, 10–20 seconds for the whole board. Output per row: rank, wallet, trader name, 30-day PnL and volume, market, side, shares, avg vs current price, current value, cash PnL, % PnL, end date, and a direct market URL. A watchlist mode accepts your own wallet list, and only position rows are charged.
It runs on Apify as Polymarket Top Traders Scraper | Whale Positions & Copy Feed — schedule it, pipe it to Sheets/Slack, or call it from an MCP client. Siblings if you want the full prediction-market stack: Polymarket Kalshi Arbitrage Scanner (same market, two venues, price gap) and Prediction Market Movers (biggest 24h probability swings on both platforms).
If you run it and it saves you a spreadsheet afternoon, a review or bookmark on the Apify page helps more than you'd think.
Not financial advice. Data is a snapshot; whales close positions too.
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