A Polymarket trading bot is a signal that runs without you. The signal can be as simple as "do what this wallet does" or as specific as "react to any new position over a certain size in a sports market priced under twenty cents". This guide builds one in Rivo's bot builder in three steps, with no code, and is honest about the one thing a Polymarket bot cannot do.
Before you start: which Polymarket
There are two venues that share the Polymarket name. Polymarket Global runs on Polygon and signs every order in your browser wallet. Polymarket US is the regulated US exchange with its own accounts and API credentials. A Rivo bot can run live on Polymarket US through your own connected account. On Polymarket Global it runs as alerts or on paper, because a server cannot sign a browser-wallet order for you, and the terminal's trade ticket places the order from your wallet when you decide to. Everything below applies to both; only the last step differs.
Step 1: pick who or what it trades
Open Bots and choose New bot. Start from Sports Whales or another template. Choose Build from scratch on the empty dashboard to open a blank signal. The builder lets you set the venue and category then refine the entry price and source trade size.
Open the bot builder from the Bots tab and choose what the bot reacts to.
Copy a trader. Every tracked Polymarket wallet has a profile built from trades we observed on the venue: the markets, the sides, the entry prices and how each position resolved. Read the profit curve, the win rate measured against the odds the wallet paid, and the results by bet size and category. If the record holds up, the profile's "Build a bot that copies" action drops the wallet into the builder. The bot will react every time that wallet opens a position, in the market it chose, on the side it chose, at the size you set. Two or more wallets can share one bot.
Build a signal. Polymarket prints thousands of large trades a day and a signal picks out the ones you care about: a category or league, a minimum trade size, a keyword in the market title, a specific market, an entry price band, and whether the trade opened a position, added to one or flipped sides. Four templates get you a working signal in one click. Start from one and edit; nobody fills in a blank form.
Step 2: read the backtest at your size
The second screen asks for a size, a fixed amount per trade or a percentage of the source trade with a cap, and replays the trigger at that size on markets that have already resolved. For a wallet you get the record, the return and the drawdown over 7, 30 or 90 days. For a signal you get every match from the last 90 days, scored, and split into an older training window and a recent validation window.
Read the validation number, not the headline. A signal that wins on the training window and loses on validation is fitted to the past, and the builder flags it as an overfit risk. Then read the sample: a signal with twenty settled matches has told you almost nothing, whatever the return says. And read the size sensitivity: a wallet whose return depends on one enormous position looks very different from one that wins small and often, and only the second is worth copying with a fixed amount per trade.
None of this is a projection. It is a paper result at the whale's entry price, and paper results do not promise live results: entry prices drift, fills are not guaranteed, and a signal can stop working.
Step 3: choose how it runs
Choose paper to track simulated results or select supported live execution. Set the schedule and choose daily summaries or every-trade updates for a signal bot. The dashboard keeps your bots together. Click a card to inspect its trades and change its settings. Use the separate Alerts column to follow traders for notifications.
A bot runs in one of three modes. Alerts only tells you when the trigger fires, in the app or on Telegram, and records nothing. Paper copies every entry with virtual money at your size and scores it when the market settles; a signal bot can also claim up to three months of matching history so it starts with a record. Live places the same entries as real orders on Polymarket US through your own connected account, inside a per-trade and a per-day ceiling.
Start on paper. Every bot can be promoted to live from its own page later, and the trigger and the size carry over, so there is nothing to rebuild. See paper trading a bot before going live for how long to leave it there.
Control how your Polymarket US bot trades
- It places entries only. Closing stays your decision, or a stop-loss and take-profit rule you arm per position.
- It stops at both ceilings, and you can pause it from its page.
- It skips a trade that has aged past the copy window, a book too thin to fill, or a price that has already decided the outcome, and logs the reason.
- It pauses itself after three consecutive execution failures. A thin book does not count.
Where this differs from a Telegram bot
Telegram copy bots such as Kreo, PolyCop and PolyGun operate a wallet for you and mirror an address for a fee per trade, with no backtest and no paper run. They are faster to a first live copy on Polymarket Global, and if speed is the whole point they win that. The comparison lays out the trade-offs from each vendor's own pages. Rivo's answer is the record, the backtest and the paper run, and a live bot that runs through an account you control.
Finding a wallet worth copying
Start from the Polymarket whale tracker or the ranked traders, open a profile, and read the record before the leaderboard number. The guide to the best Polymarket traders to follow covers what to look for, and the five mistakes copy traders make covers what to avoid.