Terminal guide

A market page is one screen with everything a decision needs on it: the book, the tape, the candles, who is holding, what their record is, and — in beta — a ticket. This page walks the layout top to bottom and is explicit about which parts are gated.

The trading surface is the market page itself, at /markets/<slug>. Open one from Trending, from any wallet dossier, or from a screener row.

Reading the page

Header and meta strip

The header carries the market title, its category, whether it is active or resolved, and two badges worth reading before anything else: whether whale flow is bullish, bearish or neutral with the count behind it, and a divergence badge that fires when sharp wallets and the crowd are on opposite sides.

The meta strip below it shows volume, traders, trades and the time of the last trade. It deliberately carries no price — price belongs on the chart and in the book, and a fourth copy of it in a stat tile is how stale numbers get quoted.

Chart

One-minute candles from our own candle store, with volume bars, a crosshair, the last-price line, and markers where alerts fired on this market. Ranges are 1H, 6H, 1D, 1W, 1M and ALL. If the candle store is unreachable the chart says so rather than drawing a flat line.

Tabs

Holders, Activity and Intel need a free account. The rest is public.

Holders, and what "proven" means

The Holders tab reads open positions from the position ledger, not from a snapshot of recent fills, so it shows what is actually held rather than what was recently traded. Each row carries the holder, the position, the entry VWAP (buy cost divided by buy shares), and a track record.

The tab splits holders into proven and unproven on one floor: at least 20 resolved bets and a win rate of at least 55%. That is a deliberately modest bar — it is there to separate "this wallet has a record" from "this wallet has nothing yet", not to declare anybody sharp. Top-5 share tells you how concentrated the side is.

The tape

The tape merges recorded executions with live prints off the websocket. What makes it useful is the third column: every print names the trader — a Polymarket name where one exists, otherwise the truncated address — tags machine-scale accounts as bots, and shows a win rate.

That win rate is suppressed below 20 resolved bets rather than shown as a meaningless percentage, prints above 60% read as sharp and below 45% as weak, and no z-score appears on the tape at all. A z-score on a single print would be a claim the print cannot support.

The book ladder

The right rail shows a depth-of-market ladder for the selected outcome: asks above, the spread in the middle, bids below, eight levels a side. The bars are cumulative notional, so the shape tells you what it costs to walk the book rather than what sits on one level, and impact is previewed at $100, $500 and $1,000.

When resting depth falls well below its recent baseline the ladder shows a thin warning with a refill countdown — that is the moment a copy trade turns into an expensive market order. An outcome with nothing resting says so plainly.

Clicking any level primes the ticket with that price. The whole page — outcome selection, ladder, tape, ticket — runs off a single live book subscription, so what you click is what the tape is quoting.

The order ticket (beta)

When trading is enabled for your account, the ladder is followed by a ticket:

• Side — buy or sell the selected outcome.
• Limit price in cents, with a one-click shortcut to the current bid or ask.
• Shares, with $10 / $50 / $100 / $500 shortcuts.
• Order type — limit good-til-cancelled, fill-or-kill, fill-and-kill, or good-til-date with an expiry. Live mode narrows this to good-til-cancelled and good-til-date.
• Preview — cost, payout if the outcome wins, and profit with the percentage.

Orders are self-directed and execute against Polymarket's own CLOB. There is no managed money, no auto-copy, and no discretionary service anywhere in the product.

Paper mode is the default

The server runs in paper mode unless it is explicitly set to live. In paper mode an order is validated exactly as a live one would be, then filled against the live book's touch price and recorded to a paper ledger — nothing reaches the exchange. A book snapshot older than 60 seconds cannot price a paper fill, so a stale market refuses rather than inventing a price.

The ticket says which mode it is in, and a paper fill reports the price it filled at so you can compare it to what you would have paid.

What has to be true before an order submits

Order submission is intentionally hard to turn on by accident. In order: the feature flag, a rate limit that fails closed if its backing store is unconfigured, authentication, an explicit account allowlist that fails closed when empty, a jurisdiction check that also fails closed, a paid plan, schema validation, market resolution to a CLOB token, and a funded, provisioned deposit wallet with approvals set. Every attempt that reaches submission writes an immutable audit row.

Any one of those failing stops the order. That is the intended behaviour for a beta that moves money.

Portfolio

The portfolio page appears once trading is enabled for your account and shows your positions, cost basis and P&L.

Cost basis is average cost, so the page separates three numbers that are usually mashed together: open P&L against what the shares you still hold cost, realized P&L locked in by sells, and total return against everything you have put in. Settled positions you have not claimed yet are called out separately — those shares are worth $1 each until you redeem them.

The positions table shows market, outcome, shares, average entry, mark, value, open P&L, realized P&L and cost, split into open and closed. The stats strip adds win rate, profit factor, average hold time and top allocation, all computed over closed positions only — a win rate that counts open positions is a win rate that counts your hopes.

The P&L curve is reconstructed on demand by replaying your fills against one-minute candles. There is no stored snapshot, which means the curve is recomputed from source every time rather than drifting from it.

Cash is read from the chain uncached. If that read fails the page says unknown rather than $0.00 — a missing balance and an empty balance are different facts.

What is not here

• No auto-execution of anybody else's trades. Following, copying and sizing are decisions you make; the ticket only ever submits what you typed.
• No portfolio snapshot history predating your fills.
• No leverage, and no margin. Polymarket does not offer them and neither do we.

Next

• Copy trade safely — the method that should precede any ticket.
• Screener — find the wallets worth watching on a market first.