How to Look Up Any Polymarket Trader's Positions, Trades and PnL

Polymarket is a glass house. Every position is a token on Polygon, every trade settles on-chain, and the platform wraps all of it in public profile pages. That is what makes whale-watching and copy trading possible. This guide shows the three ways to look up any trader, from a quick browser check to a script that refreshes every minute.

Method 1: Profile Pages

If you know the username: go to polymarket.com/@username. Usernames appear next to trades on every market page and on the leaderboard.

If you know the wallet address: go to polymarket.com/profile/0x... with the full 42-character address.

From a market page: scroll to the recent trades or top holders list and click any trader's name.

A profile shows:

• Positions: every open position with shares held, average entry price, current value and unrealized profit.
• Activity: a chronological list of trades, redemptions and rewards.
• Profit and loss: realized and unrealized totals, plus volume and markets traded.

Profiles update in near real time. If a trade just happened, give it a few seconds.

Method 2: Leaderboards

Prediction markets: polymarket.com/leaderboard ranks traders by profit and by volume, switchable between day, week, month and all time. Click a name to open the profile.

Perps: polymarket.com/perps/leaderboard is a separate ranking for perpetual futures traders. Perps accounts are keyed to the trader's signer address rather than their smart wallet, so the same person can appear under different addresses on the two boards.

The all-time profit board is dominated by a handful of accounts with seven and eight figure gains. The weekly and monthly boards are more useful for finding traders who are currently in form, and for spotting who is concentrated in the market you are researching.

Method 3: The Data API (Free, No Login)

For tracking that does not depend on refreshing a browser tab, Polymarket's Data API returns the same information as the profile page in JSON:

What	URL
Open positions	https://data-api.polymarket.com/positions?user=0x...
Closed positions with realized PnL	https://data-api.polymarket.com/positions?user=0x...&status=CLOSED
Trade history	https://data-api.polymarket.com/activity?user=0x...&type=TRADE&limit=100
Portfolio value	https://data-api.polymarket.com/value?user=0x...

Paste any of these into a browser to test. A minimal watcher that prints a whale's new trades:

import time, requests

WHALE = "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000001"
seen = set()
while True:
    trades = requests.get("https://data-api.polymarket.com/activity",
                          params={"user": WHALE, "type": "TRADE", "limit": 20}, timeout=20).json()
    for t in trades:
        key = t.get("transactionHash", "") + str(t.get("timestamp"))
        if key not in seen:
            seen.add(key)
            print(t["side"], t["size"], t["outcome"], "@", t["price"], "|", t["title"])
    time.sleep(60)

Respect the public rate limits: one request a minute per address is plenty. For dozens of addresses, use a copy-trading tool rather than hammering the API yourself.

Reading a Whale's Positions Properly

A few things that trip people up:

Size versus conviction. A $50,000 position from an account that usually trades $500,000 is a small bet. Check the trader's typical size on their activity list before copying.

Hedges. Traders often hold Yes in one market and No in a correlated one. Copying one leg without the other is a different trade entirely.

Entry price matters more than the position. The profile shows average entry. A whale long Yes from 0.20 is sitting on a win at 0.60; buying at 0.60 to follow them is not the same bet.

Perps are not visible on the events profile. A trader's perps exposure lives on the perps portfolio, which is not part of the public events profile page. The perps leaderboard shows PnL, not individual positions.

Automating It: Copy Trading

If you want trades mirrored rather than just observed, tools like PolyCOP watch a list of addresses and place matching orders for you with size limits. We reviewed how it works and the risks in the PolyCOP copy trading guide. The short version: copying works best on liquid markets with slow-moving whales, and badly on thin markets where your order moves the price before you are filled.