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Lab 4 — Whale of the week: what the Polymarket leaderboard shows, and what it hides

Status: weekly. Every Sunday the pipeline snapshots the public leaderboard, pulls the top 25 wallets in full and rewrites the block below. One wallet gets the video; the group gets the table.

Question

The weekly leaderboard says who made the most money. It does not say how: one bet or a hundred, size that moves the book or size you could match, a bettor or a market maker, and whether the "100% hit rate" a wallet's public page shows is real. All of that is in the same public API, so we read it.

What is measured

  • The #1 wallet by weekly PnL: fills, markets, active hours, how concentrated the money is (fills ≥ $10k as a share of notional), the position that made the week, the biggest loss, maker vs taker rebates.
  • Hidden losses. A position that resolves to zero never shows up in closed-positions: it stays in positions as "redeemable" for nothing. The public profile therefore lists wins only. We fold those positions back in as losses, dated by the market's end date, and report the honest 28-day hit rate and net.
  • The top 25 as a group: how many made over half their week on one position, how many are makers, how many carry hidden losses, which categories, and (from the second snapshot on) how many of last week's top 10 survived.

Nothing here is advice. Wallets are pseudonymous proxy addresses and the names are what their owners chose to display. The point is the shape of the money, not the person.

This week

Snapshot 2026-10-11 · leaderboard window: 7 days · wallets pulled in full: top 25 by weekly PnL

#1 mooseborzoii — $2,287,357 on the weekly leaderboard, $34,314,096 volume.

  • The week in trades: 4810 fills in 296 market(s) over 57.1 hours; 80 fills of $10k+ carry 44% of the money; largest single fill $196,503; median fill $32.
  • The position that made the week: Panthers on “Lions vs. Panthers” — $2,096,030 at 48.5¢ → $1,079,801 (90.4% of the week's closed PnL).
  • Biggest loss in the window: Alabama on “Georgia vs. Alabama” — $913,460 at 50.5¢ → −$461,364.
  • 28 days, everything counted: 543 wins ($11,569,967) and 308 resolved losers still sitting unredeemed (−$3,078,686) → net $1,060,481, hit rate 51.2%. The public closed-positions list shows only the wins.
  • Maker or taker: maker (maker rebates $7,878 vs taker rebates $5,094 in the window).

Top 25 together: $13,953,423 weekly PnL, the #1 wallet is 16.4% of it. 7 of 25 made more than half their week on one position (median: the best position is 33.0% of the week). 13 of 25 earn more maker than taker rebates. 23 of 25 carry resolved-but-unredeemed losses (2758 positions, −$31,360,790 over 28 days) that the closed-positions list does not show. Categories by notional: sports & esports 18, other 5, crypto 1, unknown 1. - Week-over-week churn: needs a second snapshot.

Files

  • fetch.py — leaderboard (week/month × PnL/volume), then /activity, /closed-positions, /positions for the top 25; appends the leaderboard to leaderboard_history.parquet.
  • analyze.py — the numbers above → results.json, tables.md, this README.
  • Data: data/labs/whales/<date>/ locally; the weekly parquet snapshot goes to the data-latest release.