P&L and resolutions
How Polyrank counts profit — average-cost basis, fees, redeems, splits, merges and negative-risk converts — and how a market's resolution is read, including voided markets and disputes.
What this page is for. A trader's P&L on Polyrank is rebuilt from public Polygon events, not copied from another tracker. This page says which rules the rebuild follows, so you can tell why a number differs from a site that uses other rules, and how a market's settlement is turned into payouts. For the skill metrics built on top of these positions, see How the skill metrics work.
The P&L rules
- Average-cost basis, the method Polymarket itself uses: each sell realises profit against the average price paid for the shares held, with sell-clamping (a sell never realises against more shares than were bought). Trackers that use first-in-first-out will differ.
- Peer-to-peer share transfers are ignored, and liquidity rewards are excluded: P&L comes from trading and settlement only.
- Realized P&L is cash banked from closed and resolved positions; unrealized marks the open positions at current market prices; Total P&L is their sum — the figure Polymarket's leaderboard shows.
- Fees: the profile's headline Total P&L and ROI are net of trading fees, the basis Polymarket's leaderboard uses; ROI = net P&L ÷ (everything bought + fees). Polymarket charges the taker, at shares × rate × p × (1 − p), largest near 50¢ and close to zero near 0¢ or 100¢; resting orders pay none.
- Under review: when the reconciliation against on-chain truth flags a wallet, its page says
P&L under review and the rankings leave it out until it clears, rather than show a number
Polyrank cannot stand behind (
pnl_under_reviewin the API).
How fresh each P&L figure is, surface by surface: Data freshness.
Settlement and redeems
When a market resolves, winning shares are worth $1.00 each and losing shares $0.00. If the market resolves invalid and is voided, both sides settle at $0.50 a share. The profile's Activity tab shows these settlements as Redeem rows (Payout received, Winning shares settled). They are reconstructed from the market's resolution rather than from raw on-chain redemptions, because Polymarket's auto-redeem operator claims most payouts under its own address — so a Redeem line appears even when the trader never clicked "claim", and it reconciles to the headline P&L. A side that is owed a payout nobody has claimed yet shows as Redeemable; the totals already count it.
Splits, merges and converts
The Activity tab labels three kinds of collateral plumbing. None is a directional bet:
| Activity row | What happened | Value column |
|---|---|---|
| Split | USDC turned into one YES and one NO share of the same market | USDC collateral locked |
| Merge | One YES and one NO handed back for the USDC | USDC collateral released |
| Convert | In a multi-outcome (negative-risk) market, a NO position in one leg re-expressed as YES positions across the other legs | USDC collateral moved |
Shares that arrive this way cost nothing in a position's Invested column (it counts only dollars spent buying the outcome), so a position built mostly from a split or convert can show P&L on almost no outlay; the app names that case instead of showing a bare $0.00.
A wallet that mostly trades by converting negative-risk positions is a converter. Its resolved-position record is convert arithmetic, not a forecasting record, so the profile says Not skill-rankable, the skill boards leave it out and its calibration and alpha figures are withheld. Volume, trades, positions and P&L on its page follow the usual rules.
How a market resolves
Polymarket markets settle through UMA's optimistic oracle: a proposer posts a bond and asserts the outcome, anyone can dispute by matching the bond, and disputes are settled by UMA voters. A market page names the resolution source Polymarket gives (what the proposer is expected to check — not a guarantee) and the UMA bond. While a market is resolving, the page also shows the proposed outcome, whether it is In review, Settleable or Final, and a dispute risk of Low, Elevated or High: a conservative, explainable score from the market's structure and wording (most markets score low; a condition that was disputed before is at least elevated). Polyrank reads the final payout on-chain; until then the market's live mid is shown.
For bots that settle positions mechanically, the Resolutions feed pages every
on-chain resolution in chain order, and the market.resolved webhook pushes them.
Related
- Trader profiles — where these numbers appear
- How the skill metrics work
- FAQ → Why does a trader's P&L differ from another tracker?
- Market pages
How the skill metrics work
Brier, calibration, win rate vs prediction accuracy, the edge vs the odds, the luck-adjusted edge, maker share, percentiles and sample floors — what each number measures and how to read it.
Skill persistence (measured 2026-09-30)
A one-off, dated measurement — do the traders with the highest luck-adjusted edge in one quarter stay near the top the next?