The real-time Polymarket whale tracker.

A Polymarket whale tracker is a system that monitors the live trade feed across the platform and surfaces positions large enough to indicate directional conviction. The Rivo whale tracker adds a venue-specific Kalshi path, producing a unified view of meaningful trade activity across the two largest prediction-market venues. This page describes how the tracker works, what it surfaces, and how copy-traders use it to identify positions worth following.

What counts as a whale on Polymarket and Kalshi

Rivo defines a whale trade as a single large opening position on a Polymarket or Kalshi event contract. The definition has three deliberate components.

The size floor is large enough to filter out retail-scale activity, market-maker rebalancing, and small-scale arbitrage flow. Below the threshold, trade activity is dominated by behavior that does not carry directional signal. The threshold is calibrated to produce a manageable daily volume of qualifying trades across both platforms.

The opening-position requirement excludes closes and partial exits. A $50,000 sell on a position previously entered at $30,000 is a $20,000 paper gain being realized, not a $50,000 directional view. Including exits in the whale feed would conflate two fundamentally different kinds of activity.

The per-contract framing focuses the definition on single-ticket conviction. A trader who spreads $50,000 across ten small positions is operating differently from a trader who places a single $50,000 ticket on one contract. The whale definition captures the second behavior. For a more detailed treatment, see our article on what is a whale on Polymarket.

How the Rivo whale tracker works

The tracker combines venue-specific ingestion, qualification, normalization, and enrichment into one live terminal.

Each venue has its own source path. Rivo reads Polymarket market and trade activity while maintaining a separate identity-bearing Kalshi trader stream. That distinction matters because the venues expose different identifiers and market structures. The terminal joins the results without erasing those source differences.

Trades from each platform are then normalized into a unified event schema with consistent field names, currency denominations, and timestamps. The normalized schema allows downstream filters to operate identically on Polymarket and Kalshi trades, which is important for the cross-venue copy-trading workflow.

Qualification is venue-aware. Anonymous activity must clear the whale floor, while known tracked traders can qualify at a lower trader-feed floor. Price bands, market state, book quality, identity eligibility, and entry context further reduce flow that is unlikely to represent a useful signal.

Each qualifying trade is enriched with the market title, category, current price, and wallet history where available. The enriched event is written to the public feed, persisted in the whale-events table, and passed to followed-account and strategy consumers.

Position-delta classification

A critical part of whale tracking is distinguishing opening positions from closes. Without this distinction, the whale feed is contaminated by exit flow that looks superficially similar to fresh directional bets.

Rivo classifies each trade into one of six position deltas: open, add, flip, trim, close, or unknown. Opens are fresh positions in a market where the wallet had no prior exposure. Adds are increases to an existing position on the same side. Flips are reversals from one side to the other. Trims are partial reductions of an existing position. Closes are full exits. Unknown applies to cases where the trade history is insufficient to classify reliably.

Only opens, adds, and flips are surfaced in the directional whale feed. Trims and closes remain available to the follow system because an exit by a chosen account is still useful. The classification logic is one of the more substantive engineering features of the tracker.

Wallet history and resolved PnL

Each whale trade is associated with the underlying wallet address (on Polymarket) or trader identifier (on Kalshi). The tracker maintains a per-wallet history of all recorded trades, the markets they were placed on, and the resolved outcomes where the underlying markets have settled.

The wallet history supports a per-wallet skill evaluation, which is the most important filter on the whale tracker for copy-trading purposes. A wallet with twenty or more resolved positions and positive category-specific PnL is a meaningfully more reliable copy-trading target than a wallet appearing in the feed for the first time. For the underlying analysis of whale profitability, see our article on whether Polymarket whales are actually profitable.

Public surfaces of the whale tracker

Several surfaces of the whale tracker are publicly available without authentication.

• The biggest wins page, which ranks resolved whale trades by paper PnL on the winning side.
• The biggest losses page, which ranks resolved whale trades by paper PnL on the losing side.
• The all-time wins leaderboard and all-time losses leaderboard, which provide full ranked lists across the resolved sample.
• Daily date-archive pages under /wins and /losses, which surface the resolved trades from any given trading day.

The live trade feed itself is gated behind a Rivo account. Feed access requires a $15/month subscription.

Comparison to alternative whale trackers

Several alternative services offer some form of Polymarket whale tracking. The differentiators of the Rivo tracker relative to alternatives are the cross-venue coverage (Polymarket and Kalshi in one feed), the position and trader context, followed-trader alerts, connected execution, and the public resolved- PnL leaderboards that allow users to verify the tracker's signal value before subscribing.

Free-tier alternatives often surface raw trade activity without filtering or classification, producing a feed that is technically complete but practically unusable for copy-trading. Paid alternatives typically focus on a single platform and lack the resolved-trade scoring that makes wallet skill comparable across the population. The Rivo tracker is engineered to fill the middle: complete cross-venue coverage with the filtering and classification required for actionable copy-trading.

What to read next

For the broader copy-trading framework, see our copy-trading prediction markets guide. For the Telegram alert delivery channel that surfaces whale activity in real time, see our Polymarket Telegram bot page. For the full alerts infrastructure, see our alerts page.

Backtesting whale activity with strategies

The standard advice in prediction markets is to follow the smart money. It does not say which smart money. Large positions on heavy favourites resolve correctly most of the time and return very little per dollar staked; large positions on longshots lose far more often and pay multiples when they land. Politics, sports and crypto markets behave differently again. Which of those is worth copying is an empirical question, and tracking trades as they happen does not answer it.

A Rivo strategy is that question stated as a rule and answered against data. A rule might read: entry price under 20 cents, trade size over $10,000, new positions only. Every whale trade satisfying it is recorded, and scored win or loss once the underlying market resolves.

A strategy can be tested against history and run forward at the same time. On creation it optionally claims every qualifying trade from the preceding 90 days, most of which sit in markets that have already resolved, so the strategy carries a settled record immediately rather than accumulating one over a season. From that point it also claims new qualifying trades as they print. Positions in markets that are still open are priced against current odds and marked as unrealised; they are reported separately from settled results, and are never blended into a single figure.

Criteria can constrain category, sports league, trade size, the entry price band, the position type (a new position, an addition to an existing one, or a reversal), and free text matched against the market title. Specific markets can also be followed directly, in which case their whale trades join the strategy whether or not they satisfy the other criteria.

Each recorded trade stores the side, entry price and size at the moment it printed, so a strategy's history stays reproducible. Open positions are marked against current odds; settled positions are scored win or loss against the market's resolution. A stake is set per strategy or per trade, so the reported return reflects the size you would have taken rather than the size the whale took, which keeps two strategies comparable instead of dominated by whichever caught the largest single position.

Every strategy reports its own win rate, realized return, open exposure and a cumulative return curve. All figures are paper results that assume a fill at the whale's entry price, and are not investment advice.

Frequently asked questions