What You Need Before You Start
This is a hands-on tutorial. If you are still deciding whether copy trading is right for you, start with our complete guide to copy trading on Polymarket, which covers the concept, the benefits, and the risks in depth. This page assumes you already want to do it and walks you through the actual setup.
You need three things before the first step:
A funded Polymarket account. Your capital always stays in your own Polymarket account. If you have never used the platform, our Polymarket guide covers account creation and deposits.
Polymarket API credentials. These are generated from your Polymarket account and let an external tool place orders on your behalf. You will connect them in step 2.
A PredCopy account. Sign up with your email. One subscription ($29/mo, $99/yr, or a €200 lifetime option) unlocks everything: automated copying, whale baskets, paper trading, and Telegram alerts.
Worth knowing: Polymarket now offers a native copy feature called Copycat. It works fine for basic mirroring, but it does not give you an independent risk engine, curated baskets, a paper trading mode, or external alerts. Those are the reasons a dedicated tool still makes sense, and this tutorial uses PredCopy throughout.
Step 1: Pick Wallets Worth Copying
Wallet selection matters more than any other setting. Start on the leaderboard, which ranks Polymarket wallets by verified on-chain profit, or browse the best traders directory for curated picks. Every wallet on PredCopy carries a quality score that is refreshed every 6 hours, so you are not judging on stale data.
Open a few candidate profiles and look for consistency across many markets rather than one lucky bet, a steady trading frequency, and position sizing that suggests discipline. Our wallet selection guide goes through these criteria in detail with a full checklist.
If you would rather not pick individual wallets at all, PredCopy offers curated whale baskets: groups of vetted wallets that rebalance automatically as performance shifts. Baskets are a good default for a first setup because they spread your exposure across several traders from day one.
Step 2: Connect Your Polymarket API Credentials
In your Polymarket account, generate API credentials (an API key, secret, and passphrase). Then paste them into the credentials section of your PredCopy settings.
Two things to understand about how this works. First, your credentials are stored encrypted, not in plain text. Second, PredCopy never holds your funds. Your USDC stays in your Polymarket account at all times, and the credentials only authorize order placement there. You can revoke them from Polymarket whenever you want, which immediately cuts off the connection.
Once saved, PredCopy verifies the credentials and marks your account as ready for live copying.
Step 3: Configure Your Risk Settings
Before activating anything, set your guardrails. PredCopy's risk engine has four main controls:
Bet size scaling. Whales bet whale-sized amounts, so you never copy 1:1. Set either a fixed amount per trade or a percentage of the whale's position. This is the single most important setting: it decides how much of your balance each copied trade commits.
Max exposure cap. A hard ceiling on your total open positions. When you hit it, the engine stops opening new positions no matter what the whale does. Set this well below your full balance when starting out.
Stale position exit. Automatically closes positions that have sat idle too long, so capital does not stay locked in markets the whale has effectively abandoned.
Bid collapse detection. If the market has already moved sharply by the time your copy would execute, the engine skips the entry rather than chasing a bad price.
A sensible first configuration is conservative on all four: small fixed bet size, a low exposure cap, and both protective exits enabled. You can loosen the limits once you have seen a few weeks of real behavior.
Step 4: Activate Copying and Monitor
Flip on copying for your chosen wallets or basket. From that moment, the PredCopy engine watches your wallets continuously and mirrors new trades within seconds of detection. Orders are executed through Polymarket's CLOB using Fill-or-Kill orders, which means each copy either fills at an acceptable price or does not execute at all. There are no partial fills at bad prices.
Your dashboard shows every open position, every copied trade, and how each one is performing. You do not need to keep the dashboard open, though. Connect the Telegram bot to get instant alerts when a copy executes, a daily digest summarizing your activity and results, and interactive commands to check positions or pause copying from your phone.
You can stop copying, swap wallets, or tighten your risk settings at any time. Changes take effect on the next engine tick, which is a matter of seconds.
Try It With Paper Trading First
If you are hesitant to put real money behind a strategy you have not watched in action, use paper trading mode. It gives you a virtual $1,000 balance and runs the exact same trade detection and execution logic as live copying. Same wallets, same risk engine, same timing, just simulated money.
Paper trading is included with every plan, and it is the honest way to evaluate both a wallet and your own settings. Run a basket or a couple of wallets on paper for a few weeks, look at what actually got copied and at what prices, then move to live copying with the configuration you have already validated.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Copying a single wallet. Even excellent traders hit losing streaks. Following one wallet ties your results entirely to their variance. Copy several wallets with different specialties, or use a curated basket, so no single cold streak defines your outcome.
Oversizing bets. The most common beginner error is setting bet sizes that feel exciting instead of sustainable. If a normal losing week would make you want to shut everything off, your sizing is too big. Scale down until drawdowns are boring.
Set and forget. Copy trading is automated, not unattended. Review your dashboard or your Telegram digest weekly. Check whether the wallets you follow still score well, whether your exposure cap still fits your balance, and whether any position has gone stale. Wallets that were great six months ago are not automatically great today, which is exactly why quality scores refresh every 6 hours.
Skipping the paper stage. There is no cost to validating your setup with the virtual balance first. Skipping it means paying real money for lessons the simulator would have taught you for free.
That is the whole setup: pick wallets, connect credentials, set limits, activate, and review weekly. Head to the live leaderboard to start shortlisting wallets now.