How to Use SmartStake Insiders: On-Chain Sharp Money

SmartStake Insiders turns on-chain sharp money into a bet slip. A backend audit qualifies a set of Polymarket Wallets on their historical record, and every position one of those traders opens becomes a Pick on the board, matched to the sportsbooks pricing the same Selection.

That last step is what makes it a betting tool rather than a blockchain explorer. You are not reading a whale's portfolio. You are reading the price you could take right now on a bet a qualified trader has already committed money to.

Try it: one Pick

Drag the three sliders. The first is what the Wallet paid on Polymarket, the second is its historical ROI, and the third is what a sportsbook is offering on the same Selection. Watch the top badge as you shorten the sportsbook price.

Two things in there are not obvious from the screen itself, and the rest of this guide is mostly about them: the board refuses to show you a price worse than the Wallet's own, and the recommended stake gets smaller as the price gets better.

What a Pick is made of

A Wallet is a Polymarket proxy address that passed the qualification audit. A Pick is one bet that Wallet has taken, attributed to it and priced against the sportsbook market covering the same Selection. One Wallet produces many Picks; each Pick belongs to exactly one Wallet.

Every card carries the same six numbers:

Relative Size is the conviction reading. A Wallet that usually commits $2,000 and has just put up $9,000 is telling you something its ROI badge cannot. Position Stake is deliberately the original commitment, so it does not shrink when the trader takes chips off the table, and the conviction signal survives a partial exit.

The price floor you cannot see

Here is the part no competitor page can write, because it lives in the query rather than the interface. The feed joins a sportsbook row to a signal only when that book's decimal odds are at least the Wallet's own odds. Anything shorter is filtered out before the board is assembled.

The consequence is structural. Take the illustrative Pick in the widget above, a made up example rather than a live one: the Wallet paid 42.0¢, which is decimal 2.3810, or +138. A book offering +130 prices the same Selection at 43.5¢, which is 1.48 cents worse than the Wallet paid, and that row never reaches the board at all. Drag the price slider below +138 and watch the badge flip.

So every sportsbook Pick on the screen is priced at or better than the trader's own fill. At +150 you pay 40.0¢ against the Wallet's 42.0¢, a 2 cent discount on the same bet. The slippage figure on the card, which is your price minus the Wallet's entry, cannot come out positive on a sportsbook row.

That also explains a filter that otherwise looks broken. Max Slippage defaults to 5 cents, and since sportsbook rows structurally cannot exceed it, in practice it is a Polymarket-only filter. Tighten it and you are pruning prediction-market rows that have run away from the Wallet, not sportsbook rows.

This is the same instinct behind line shopping and the Odds Screen, applied one step earlier: the board simply declines to show you the version of the bet that is worse than the one the signal was built on.

Why Rec Bet shrinks as the price grows

Rec Bet is a Kelly stake, and Kelly needs an edge. Insiders does not have your probability estimate, so it substitutes the only estimate it has: the Wallet's historical sports ROI.

$f = \frac{\text{ROI}}{o - 1}$

Multiply that fraction by your bankroll and your Kelly multiplier, which defaults to 0.25, and you have the number in the column. On a $2,000 bankroll at 0.25x, a 12.4% ROI Wallet at +150 gives a Kelly fraction of 8.27% and a Rec Bet of $41.33, which buys 103 shares at 40.0¢.

Now read what that substitution assumes. Standard Kelly stakes $f = (p \cdot o - 1)/(o - 1)$, so setting the numerator to the ROI pins the win probability to:

$p = \frac{1 + \text{ROI}}{o}$

Which means the assumed expected value per dollar staked comes back as the ROI itself, at every price. The model is not measuring how far the bet is mispriced. It is assuming the Pick returns this Wallet's past ROI per dollar whatever you pay, which is an assumption borrowed from history rather than a projection of your results.

The edge it assumes in probability points is therefore $\text{ROI}/o$, and it shrinks as the price lengthens. At +150 the stake implies a 44.96% win chance against the price's own 40.00%, an assumed edge of 4.96 points. At +250 it implies 32.11% against 28.57%, only 3.54 points.

So the stake falls with the price. The same Wallet's Pick at +250 gets $24.80 rather than $41.33, about 40% less money on a longer price. Hold the Wallet's own fill fixed as your probability estimate instead, and textbook Kelly does the opposite: it stakes $60.07 at +150 and $130.46 at +250, which at the longer price is more than five times what the column recommends.

Neither is wrong. They answer different questions. Rec Bet is a conviction-scaled stake anchored on a track record, not an edge computed from the price, and it is deliberately conservative about prices that have run long. If you have your own probability for the Selection, that is what the Kelly calculator and the staking rules in bankroll management are for.

Reading the Market Breakdown

Open a Pick and the Market Breakdown panel aggregates every active Insider Position on that Market into per-Selection roll-ups: the number of positions, total Position Stake, average, max, and a stake-weighted entry price.

Two details change how you read it. The bar is each Selection's share of total Position Stake, so it is a money split rather than a headcount, and the entry price is weighted by stake, so one large position moves the consensus price more than three small ones. That is usually what you want from a conviction reading.

The panel is also self-contained. It ignores the confidence, odds, sportsbook, and league filters on the parent screen, so it always shows every active position on the Market. A Market that looks one-sided on the board can be genuinely split once you open it.

If both Selections carry stake, qualified traders disagree, and the split tells you by how much. Note that positions on opposite sides are not necessarily a contradiction: they may be different traders with different entry prices, and the devig of the current market is what settles who is getting value.

Why a Pick disappears

Every Insiders query is gated on signals from the last 3 minutes. A Pick is on the board only while the backend keeps republishing the Wallet's position, so the feed is a live view of open conviction rather than a log of what has been bet.

Picks therefore drop off routinely. The Wallet exits, the event starts, or the signal simply stops refreshing. If a Pick you were considering is gone, that is the normal end of its life. Take the ones you want when you see them, and use the bet tracker to keep the record.

Two more reasons a board can look empty. Untracking a Wallet removes all of its Picks, and only that negative list is stored, so every Wallet is Tracked until you say otherwise. And the share price filter is expressed in cents while the query runs on odds, so its bounds swap: a maximum price in cents becomes a minimum in odds.

Unmapped Picks

Some Polymarket markets have no match in the mapping tables. Those surface as Unmapped Picks, flagged internally by having no market data, and they behave differently on purpose.

An Unmapped Pick has no sportsbook odds, no cross-book comparison, no Market Breakdown, and no line history, because there is no sportsbook row to join to. What it keeps is everything Polymarket-native: the Wallet's entry price, the current Polymarket price, the confidence score, the order book, the order fills, and the price chart.

They are worth watching rather than dismissing. Cluster I markets are where competitors do not rank and where sportsbooks are often slowest, so an Unmapped Pick is frequently the earliest thing on the board. Our prediction market betting guide covers why those markets price differently, and Polymarket vs Kalshi covers the venues.

Wallets mode

The mode selector flips the board from Picks to the traders themselves. A Wallet card shows a short display id built from the first three characters of its address, its tier badge, and its performance, and tapping one opens its recent Polymarket positions.

The two ROI windows on a Wallet mean different things, and mixing them up is the easiest mistake on the screen:

• Backtest measures the Wallet's own historical record on directional sports positions settled before it was qualified. It is frozen at qualification time and answers whether this trader has edge.
• Forward Test measures how our signals on that Wallet have performed since it was qualified, updated daily. It answers whether the signals have held up out of sample.

Forward Test is the hero metric on the card for that reason: it is out-of-sample. When a Wallet has no Forward Test positions yet, the card falls back to Backtest values and tags itself accordingly, which is your cue that the number in front of you is the frozen one.

Both windows count directional positions only. A Wallet holding both sides of a Market in balance is arbitraging rather than expressing a view, and those positions are excluded from the ROI so a hedged position, which is never truly without risk anyway, cannot flatter a record.

The Sport tabs are a re-keying rather than a filter. Tapping Soccer re-points every card at that sport's own numbers and re-ranks the list, so a Wallet that looks strong overall can sit mid-table in the sport you actually bet.

Taking a Pick

The price on a card links straight to the book, and taking a Pick writes a Wager into your tracker tagged to the Insiders tool. That tagging is the point: it lets Performance report on how Insiders has done for you specifically, rather than leaving you with the tool's aggregate.

Do that from the first Pick. A tool's published record and your record diverge for ordinary reasons, mostly the prices you actually got and which Picks you chose to take, and only your own log can tell you which.

How Insiders differs from Smart Money

The two tools look adjacent and are not. Smart Money reads sportsbook behaviour: line moves, handle splits, the footprints described in what is sharp money. It infers sharp action from how books respond to it.

Insiders reads settled positions on a public ledger. There is no inference about who moved a line, because the position, its size, and its price are all on-chain and attributed to a Wallet with an audited record.

That is the real differentiator, and it is a structural one: a competitor without a prediction-market pipeline cannot build this feed at all. It also has an honest limit. On-chain conviction tells you a trader believes something, not that they are right, and a Wallet's record is a sample that can turn.

FAQ

What is SmartStake Insiders? SmartStake Insiders is a feed of sportsbook Picks derived from on-chain Polymarket activity. A backend audit qualifies a set of Polymarket Wallets on their historical record, and every position one of those Wallets opens becomes a Pick on the board, matched to the sportsbook markets covering the same Selection. It is Polymarket whale tracking pointed at a sportsbook bet slip rather than at a portfolio.

Why is the sportsbook price never worse than what the Wallet paid? The query that builds the feed only joins a sportsbook row when that book's decimal odds are at least the Wallet's own odds. A shorter price is filtered out before it reaches the board. So on every sportsbook Pick you see, the price is at or better than the Wallet's fill, and the slippage figure on the card cannot be positive. Polymarket rows are deliberately exempt from that floor, which is why slippage is a number worth reading there.

What does the Rec Bet column assume? Rec Bet is a Kelly stake that substitutes the Wallet's historical sports ROI for the edge term, so it assumes the Pick returns that same ROI per dollar at whatever price the book is showing. That makes a longer price read as a lower win chance rather than as a bigger edge, so the recommended stake shrinks as the price grows. Past ROI does not carry forward and any single bet can win or lose.

Why did a Pick disappear from the Insiders feed? Every Insiders query is gated on signals from the last 3 minutes, so a Pick stays on the board only while the backend keeps republishing the Wallet's position. When the Wallet exits, or the event starts, or the signal simply stops refreshing, the Pick drops off. A Pick vanishing is the normal end of its life, not an error.

What is the difference between Backtest and Forward Test? Backtest measures the Wallet's own historical record on directional sports positions settled before it was qualified, and it is frozen at qualification time. Forward Test measures how SmartStake's signals on that Wallet have done since, updated daily. Backtest answers whether the trader had edge; Forward Test answers whether the signals have held up out of sample.

Bottom line

Read Insiders in this order. Score and Relative Size tell you how much conviction is behind the Pick. The price tells you what it costs, and the floor keeps it from being worse than what the trader paid. Rec Bet is a starting point scaled to a track record, not an edge you have measured yourself.

Then log what you take. The Performance dashboard and closing line value will tell you, over enough bets, whether following these Wallets is working for you, and that is the only number about your own betting that is worth trusting.