- Profit is concentrated. On the all-time leaderboard across every category, the top 10 of 50 listed wallets hold 40.2% of the profit shown; in politics they hold 61.6%.
- Only 13 of our 200 tracked wallets (6.5%) earn most of their profit from market making. 174 (87.0%) are directional traders who take a side on an outcome.
- Academic work on Polymarket data finds the top 1% of accounts with positive profit take 76.5% of all profits, and that only 3.14% of accounts are statistically skilled.
- Our 100 largest resolved wins have a median of $190,918. That is a result of surviving selection, not a typical outcome for a new account.
This article uses public Polymarket data: the leaderboards and open positions of 200 tracked wallets, snapshot dated 2026-10-07. It describes who has already made money. It is not advice, a wallet is not necessarily one person, and the method is on our methodology page. We never name or identify a wallet.
How concentrated is the profit?
A leaderboard ranks wallets by profit. "Top-10 share" below means the share of the total profit on the 50 listed rows that belongs to the 10 best-ranked wallets. Because we only see 50 rows per board, this understates concentration across all accounts, since the accounts below the board are not in the denominator.
All-time boards as of the 2026-10-07 snapshot:
| Category | Profit on the 50 listed rows | Top-10 share |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | $310.9M | 40.2% |
| Sports | $233.1M | 42.6% |
| Politics | $152.6M | 61.6% |
| Esports | $43.1M | 46.7% |
| Crypto | $35.3M | 37.8% |
| Economics | $15.5M | 45.4% |
| Culture | $9.9M | 37.5% |
| Tech | $3.9M | 57.2% |
Politics and tech are the most top-heavy; the pack does not say why. Short windows are more extreme still: the one-day weather board puts 78.0% of its profit in the top 10 rows, though that board totals only $61,282, so a single good day moves it.
Makers versus directional traders
A market maker posts resting orders on both sides of a market and earns the spread plus any fee rebates or liquidity rewards. A directional trader buys one outcome because they expect it to happen. We classify a tracked wallet as a maker when rebates, liquidity rewards and liquidity-provider profit make up at least half of its realized all-time profit.
By that rule, 13 of the 200 wallets (6.5%) are makers, 174 (87.0%) are directional, and 13 are unclassified. So the cohort of profitable wallets is mostly people who take a view, not people who provide liquidity. That is partly how we built it, since we sampled from leaderboards, which rank by profit and not by consistency. It should not be read as proof that directional trading is the easier route.
Two more facts about the cohort: the median wallet has 843 all-time trades, and 44 wallets appear on three or more category boards. Those are the two activity figures the pack records.
What the biggest resolved wins look like
Our fact pack lists the 100 largest resolved wins in the cohort. The largest is $1,160,550 and the median is $190,918. The top 10 wins add up to $7,091,061. By category, 55 wins came from sports, totalling $13,463,078, and 45 came from everything else, totalling $11,223,740.
Read this as survivorship. We are looking at the best outcomes among wallets selected for already being profitable. It says that large wins exist in both sports and non-sports markets. It does not say how often a new trader would see one. For how a price maps to a probability, see What does a 72 cent contract mean?
What the research says
Profit is top-heavy
A CEPR discussion paper by Akey, Gregoire, Harvie and Martineau analyzed 588,000,000 trades and $67 billion of volume. It reports that the top 1% of users with positive profit captured 76.5% of profits (CEPR paper).
Skill exists, but it is rare
Gomez-Cram, Guo, Jensen and Kung report that 3.14% of accounts are statistically skilled, and that 44% of that group persists out of sample. Skilled accounts and makers together account for about 30% of gains, and only 12% of the top earners are in the skilled group. Their finding is that 60% of lucky winners revert (skill-versus-luck paper). The practical lesson: a profitable year is weak evidence of skill, and some leaderboard winners may be lucky.
Some of the volume is not real
A Columbia study of wash trading, meaning a trader trading with themselves to inflate volume, analyzed 1,260,000 wallets. It estimates 25% of 2022 to 2025 volume was wash, 14% of wallets were flagged, and 45% of sports volume was wash (wash-trading paper). Volume is therefore a poor stand-in for real interest, and some leaderboard rows may reflect it.
Arbitrage profits were real
Saguillo and co-authors estimate $40,000,000 of realized arbitrage between April 2024 and April 2025, of which $29,000,000 came from negative-risk markets, where the outcomes of a multi-outcome event should sum to $1 (arbitrage paper). They found an opportunity in 7,051 of 17,218 conditions, and the top account made $2,000,000.
What this means for a new trader
- Fees decide the edge. Polymarket charges makers nothing and charges takers by category, at 0.04 for politics, finance, tech and mentions, 0.05 for sports, economics, culture, weather and other markets, and 0.07 for crypto, with geopolitics at zero (fee documentation linked in the sources). On Kalshi the taker fee on 100 contracts at 50¢ is $1.75 under the schedule effective July 7, 2026; the maker rate is 0.0175, but the default maker multiplier is 0, so most resting orders pay nothing. Run your own numbers in the fee calculator.
- Resting orders are cheaper. Makers pay no fee on Polymarket and, on most Kalshi markets, none either. That is a fee saving, not evidence that making is easier; the studies above cannot separate makers' gains from skilled traders' gains.
- Discount leaderboards. Concentration plus reversion means the visible winners are a poor guide.
- Look at the crowd, not the rank. Where the cohort holds the most money is described in our cohort positioning report.
Where this can go wrong
- Our cohort is chosen from leaderboards, so it is biased toward past winners.
- Top-10 share on 50 rows is not the same as concentration across all accounts.
- One person can run several wallets, and one wallet can be a hedge for a position held elsewhere.
- Wash trading may inflate some rows, especially in sports.
- Profits are before your own fees and slippage, and thin markets may not fill at the quoted price.
- The maker rule is a threshold at half of profit; a wallet near it could land on either side.
These findings could change if the next snapshots show more makers entering the cohort, or if the top-10 shares fall as new wallets climb the boards. Browse live prices on our politics and sports market pages, and read What are prediction markets? if the vocabulary is new.
The short version: most of the measured profit goes to a small group, few accounts are statistically skilled, and the cheapest edge a newcomer can claim is paying lower fees and avoiding the claim that a leaderboard rank means a repeatable method. For the platform side, see our Polymarket review.