Galaxy looked at 2.9M Polymarket retail accounts. 69% are below break-even, and bots are up $247M.
Galaxy Research put out an onchain breakdown of Polymarket trader behavior, covering the platform's full history. Some numbers that stood out:
- 69.2% of retail accounts are below break-even. The median account is down about $3.
- Retail lost $338.9M in total.
- Automated accounts are 4.1% of accounts but placed 80.8% of all orders, and they're up $246.8M collectively.
The specialization part is more interesting than I expected. Specialists overall did slightly worse than generalists (28.1% profitable vs. 30.4%). But it depends heavily on the topic:
- Tech/science specialists: 41.2% profitable
- Finance specialists: 36.8%
- Sports specialists: 25.1%. They're also nearly half of all specialists.
So specializing only seems to help where there's actually an information edge to have.
The churn finding was also interesting: after a loss, accounts were ~2.5x more likely to stop trading for 30+ days than after a win.
u/EmbarrassedStudent10 — 13 days ago