How many Polymarket sports traders are profitable? A census of 49,118 wallets

Fewer than half of the Polymarket wallets that trade sports seriously are ahead. On October 11, 2026, 43.7% of the 49,118 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets were in profit, give or take 0.44 points, and the median wallet was $46 down.

The ones who are up won more than the rest lost. 21,459 wallets in profit made $824 million between them, and 27,646 wallets at a loss gave back $485 million, as the chart below shows. Fewer than half is still many times the few percent sportsbooks quote for their own customers, and the sections below show what the winners do differently: they pay less than the outcome is worth.

On September 13, 2026 this page reported that 48.8% of 36,149 wallets were in profit, with the median wallet $8 down and the top 1% holding 68.0% of the winnings. The same queries on the same table on October 11, 2026 find 43.7% of 49,118, $46 down, and 77.7%, as the chart below shows.

The table changed under the study. Since late September 2026 it counts settled positions 0xinsider knew only from Polymarket's own position data, and since October 7 a wallet's P&L includes markets it bought on both sides. September's census read a partial record of the same wallets, and 12,969 more wallets now clear the 20-market floor.

Three conclusions changed with it. The share in profit no longer climbs with experience: it sits between 40.9% and 45.7% from 20 to 1,999 settled markets, where September had it rising from 47.4% to 57.1%. The largest sports, which sat within a point of half, now all sit below it, and MMA, not cricket, has the highest share. And the top 1% won $640.1 million, far more than the bottom 10% lost, where September had the two ends close to even.

Two findings held on both runs: wallets that paid less than the outcome was worth were about three times as likely to be up, and the letters S to F sort the money the same way. Everything after this section is the October 11 run.

0xinsider keeps a per-wallet record in every Polymarket category: settled markets, wins, losses, realized P&L, the average entry price, and the calibration edge, which is the gap between how often the wallet won and the price it paid. This study reads that record for the sports categories, Soccer, Basketball, Esports, Tennis, Hockey, Baseball, Football, MMA, Cricket, Golf, Boxing, and Polymarket's generic Sports tag, as of October 11, 2026.

A market counts when the wallet had $20 or more at stake and a valid entry price on the side it held, and the market has settled. A wallet enters a category's record at five such markets: 83,966 wallets and 18,814,598 settled wallet-markets across the sports categories. A market the wallet bought on both sides counts in its P&L, wins and losses; the entry price and edge read only the one-sided markets, 75.3% of the total.

The study population is the 49,118 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets in total, because 20 is roughly where a record starts to describe the trader rather than the month. The chart below shows the two in five that fall short, and the sample-size section of the sports analytics guide has the arithmetic.

P&L is realized P&L on settled markets, summed. Open positions, unsettled markets and anything outside the sports categories are not in it.

45.8% of the wallets are within $1,000 of zero after 20 or more settled sports markets. The tenth percentile is $8,866 down and the ninetieth $7,028 up, so eight wallets in ten sit inside a band about $16,000 wide.

The losers outnumber the winners at every size: 9.3% have lost more than $10,000 against 8.2% who won that much, and 20.6% have lost $1,000 to $10,000 against 16.0%. Under half is what a fair price with a fee should produce, because the fee and the spread come out of somebody.

The size of the wins is the surprise. The 4,040 wallets that won more than $10,000 hold $793.6 million between them, more than every losing wallet in the population lost combined. The chart below is the distribution.

Rank the 49,118 wallets by P&L and the money sits at the top. The top 1%, 492 wallets, have won $640.1 million between them, 77.7% of the gross profit of every wallet in profit, with a median of $519,385 each. The next 9% have won $160.9 million. The 40% below them share $23.1 million, a median of $478 each.

The losing end is smaller. The bottom 10%, 4,910 wallets, have lost $448.5 million, a median of $23,194 each, and the 40% just below the middle have lost $36.3 million between them. The top 1% alone won more than the bottom 10% lost.

The population's net is $339.3 million in profit. It is above zero because the population is only wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets. The wallets with fewer, the market makers whose fills settle elsewhere, and the fee are on the other side of it.

Split by sport, counting wallets with 20 or more settled markets in that sport, the five biggest populations all sit below half: soccer lowest at 44.5%, then tennis, basketball and esports, up to baseball at 47.1%. Hockey, football, cricket and MMA sit above half, from 51.9% to 55.4%, and each of their intervals clears 50.

The intervals widen as the populations shrink. Soccer's 44.5% is good to 0.6 of a point across 26,457 wallets; cricket's 54.2% is good to 2.5 points across 1,549. Golf, 498 wallets at 61.0%, and boxing, 92 wallets at 67.4%, are below the table's floor of a thousand wallets.

Median P&L is within $61 of zero in every sport in the table. The tails are widest in football, where a tenth-percentile wallet is $8,054 down and a ninetieth-percentile one $14,527 up. Basketball and Football are Polymarket's canonical categories, so basketball includes the NBA, the WNBA, and college basketball, and football includes the NFL and college football.

Settling more markets does not move the share in profit until a wallet has settled thousands. From 20 to 1,999 settled sports markets it stays between 40.9% and 45.7%, lowest at 100 to 499. At 2,000 or more, 1,468 wallets, it is 59.6%, and the median wallet in that band is $4,529 up.

The 34,848 wallets with 5 to 19 settled markets are outside the study population and shown for comparison; 44.1% of them are up.

The spread of outcomes widens much faster than the share. The ninetieth-percentile wallet in the 2,000-plus band is $274,460 up and the tenth-percentile one $61,566 down. Experience does not make the bet safer. It makes the result bigger, in both directions.

Part of the jump at 2,000 is who gets there. A wallet that keeps losing tends to stop long before 2,000 markets, and the limits section below measures the effect: wallets still trading are up more often than wallets that stopped.

The average calibration edge does not climb either: 1.67 points at 20 to 49 markets, 1.04 at 100 to 499, 2.30 at 2,000 or more. A large edge on a few markets is a smaller number in dollars than a modest one on thousands, so the share in profit and the median P&L are the better readings of what experience does.

45,913 of the 49,118 wallets carry a 0xinsider grade, S to F, and 3,205 are unranked. The grade is built from the wallet's settled record, so this section describes what each letter means in sports dollars. It is not a test of whether the grade predicts anything. The sharp money study is that test: it scores each buy against the grade the wallet held before the game.

S wallets, 269 of them, are in profit 89.6% of the time with a median sports P&L of $155,419. A, B and C wallets are in profit 75.8% to 85.9% of the time. D wallets, the largest group at 34.1% of the population, are in profit 30.5% of the time, median $125 down. F wallets, 27.2%, are in profit 15.8% of the time, median $4,087 down.

In net dollars the letters are two groups. S, A, B and C wallets have won $705.6 million between them. D wallets sit at $7.7 million. F wallets have lost $380.2 million: 13,358 wallets, more than a quarter of the population, carrying most of its losses. The unranked wallets are in profit 51.5% of the time.

The wallets in profit and the rest pay almost the same price, 57.7 cents on average against 58.5, and get very different outcomes for it. The wallets in profit buy outcomes that happen more often than the price says, a mean calibration edge of plus 5.21 points. The rest come in 1.51 points under their price: they pay more than their outcomes are worth.

49,264 wallets with 20 or more settled sports markets, rerun October 12, 2026; entry and edge weighted by each category's scored markets. The edge-sign chart excludes 91 wallets without a scored edge; these are not zero-edge wallets. The edge says the same thing wallet by wallet. 79.9% of the wallets in profit have a positive edge; 40.4% of the rest do.

Run it the other way and the edge sorts the money. Of the 28,404 wallets with a positive calibration edge, 60.6% are in profit, median $198 up. Of the 20,769 with an edge at or below zero, 20.6% are, median $890 down.

The edge is a per-market average and P&L is a dollar sum, so they disagree on a wallet that sizes badly, and on about a third of wallets they do. Across the population, the wallets that are up are the wallets that paid less than the outcome was worth.

Pay less than the outcome is worth and you are probably in the group that is up. Wallets with a positive calibration edge, how often they won minus the average price they paid, were about three times as likely to be in profit as the rest, as the chart below shows.

Being ahead and being paid are different things. A few hundred wallets hold most of the winnings, and the middle 80% sit between $8,866 down and $7,028 up. Reaching the top 1% takes an edge that survives thousands of markets. Stopping the losses takes only one change: stop paying more than the outcome is worth.

You can see which side of that line you are on. Once a wallet has 30 settled markets of $20 or more at a known price, its 0xinsider profile shows its edge under its name: wins minus price paid, pulled toward the average by how short the record is. It tells you which group you are in before the P&L does.

It is a snapshot of realized P&L on settled markets as of one date. A wallet that is $5,000 up on settled markets and $8,000 down on open ones reads as $5,000 up. A position closed before settlement is in the settled figure at what it realized.

It does not see fees separately, it does not count markets under $20 at stake, and it counts a wallet's sports record only in categories where the wallet has five or more settled markets. A wallet is an address. One person can run several and several people can share one.

The population is wallets that kept trading long enough to settle 20 markets, and a wallet that lost early and quit never got there. The run sizes part of that: wallets that settled 5 to 19 sports markets and have not traded sports in 60 days were in profit 43.2% of the time, against 43.7% for the census, as the chart below shows. A wallet that quit before five markets is not in the table at all.

The grade section is descriptive. The grade is computed from the same settled history that produced the P&L, so a high grade beside a high P&L is the grade doing its job. For prediction, read the sharp money study.

And a share in profit is not a return. A wallet $8 up over 500 markets and $2 million staked has made nothing. This study answers who is up. The return on stake is a different question with a different denominator.

Ask how many sportsbook customers make money and the answer is a small number: two, three, or five percent, depending on who is quoting it. The figure has no public dataset behind it. It is a bookmaker's view of a bookmaker's customers, and the bookmaker's standard -110 line costs more on every bet than a Polymarket order does, as the chart below shows, so most of its customers lose by construction.

Polymarket is a different market. There is no line to shade and no house on the other side of the bet. A trader who buys a team at 60 cents is trading with a trader who sold it, and the market keeps a small fee. Every position is public, settles on chain, and belongs to a wallet address.

That makes the question countable. This study counts it: how many Polymarket sports wallets are up, by how much, how concentrated the winnings are, and what the wallets in profit do differently from the rest.

Three in five census wallets grade D or F, as the chart below shows, so the odds are that a sports record of 20 markets reads the same way. Open your own wallet on 0xinsider to see which letter yours carries. The profile shows all-time P&L, win rate, markets traded and the grade, and once the wallet has 30 priced settled markets, its edge. Grade yourself on that record: P&L alone is a sum that can hide a bad price behind a good month.

The leaderboard ranks wallets graded S, A or B by grade, which is mostly realized P&L, and each sport's leaderboard ranks wallets by edge on that sport's settled markets. The sports boards, for soccer, the NBA, tennis, esports and the rest, show which side the profitable wallets hold on each game, live on Pro and delayed or locked without it. Profitable wallets are the S, A and B cohort this study describes in dollars.

The profitable sports trader guide turns this study into a set of habits, and the grades guide covers what each letter means.

The census comes from one read-only run of a set of queries against the production database's read replica at 14:01 UTC on October 11, 2026. The query text and the raw output are public in the 0xinsider research repository, under polymarket-sports-markets, as wallet-census-2026-10-11.sql and wallet-census-2026-10-11-output.txt. The superseded September 13 run sits beside them as wallet-census.sql and its output. The cost of a bet in the bookmaker section is not part of the census: it is arithmetic on Polymarket's published fee schedule and the median spread from the timing study's October 10 run, timing-2026-10-10.sql in the same folder.

The query reads the per-wallet category table for the twelve sports categories, adds each wallet's rows together, and counts. Nothing is sampled and nothing is modeled. The intervals on the shares are plain binomial half-widths, which is all a population share needs.

Rerun it and the counts will be higher, as the chart below shows: wallets keep settling markets and crossing 20, and four weeks after September 13 the same queries found 12,969 more wallets past the floor, partly new trading and partly records the table could not see in September. The share in profit, which this page once said should hold within a point, moved five.