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A copy trade places market orders. That single fact decides which wallets are worth following, and it is not the same question as which wallets are profitable.

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Taker share

Taker share is the fraction of a wallet’s volume that crossed the spread — that is, took liquidity off the book rather than resting on it and waiting to be filled. It is weighted by notional, not by fill count, so one large take counts for more than a hundred tiny ones. Ballista names three bands: The percentage is always shown beside the label. It is a description, not a score: nothing blends it with P&L or win rate into a grade, because a blended number would hide exactly the disagreement between the two that you need to see.

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Why a passive wallet copies badly

A passive wallet’s edge lives in resting orders that a copy trade cannot reproduce. They posted a bid, waited, and got filled by someone in a hurry — and collected the spread for the service. Your copy trade does the opposite: it crosses the spread to get in, paying the very thing the leader was earning. So a passive wallet with a spectacular P&L is not a wallet to copy. Copying it does not reproduce the strategy, however good the record looks. That is the single most useful thing a trader profile can tell you, and it is why Ballista puts the number at the top of one.
When you type a passive wallet into a copy-trade or backtest form, Ballista says so under the address field before you submit. The notice is dismissable and never blocks you — finding out how much of a passive wallet’s P&L survives a copy is a perfectly good reason to run a backtest.

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When the number is blank

Taker share is computed from a trade tape Ballista holds for that wallet, and pulling a full tape is heavy, rate-limited work shared with live copy trading — so merely viewing a profile does not start one. A blank is never a zero, and it is never “this wallet is passive”. It means nobody has measured it.

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Copy friction

Taker share says whether a wallet’s edge is the kind a copy trade can follow. Copy friction says how much of it survives being followed, in the wallet’s own dollars. Ballista measures it with its own engine. The wallet’s last 30 days of fills are replayed one for one, as though a copier had taken every one of them — same market, same direction, same size, same moment — but always as the aggressor:
  • every fill executes at a slippage-adjusted price, 1% per fill, which is exactly the execution cost the backtester charges by default, so the board and a backtest of the same wallet rest on the same assumption;
  • every fill pays the market’s real Polymarket taker fee, charged per fill at the schedule for that market’s category;
  • settlements pay face value with no friction, because redeeming a resolved market is an on-chain call rather than a trade.
That replayed P&L is then compared against the wallet’s actual 30-day P&L, which is computed from the same fills over the same markets. Because the inclusion set is identical, the difference between them is friction and only friction — not a coverage difference. Two figures come out of it: The profile shows both next to the replayed P&L and the wallet’s actual P&L, so you can check the subtraction yourself. This is the question a P&L column cannot answer. A wallet can be up six figures and still be uncopyable, because its edge was collected on the side of the trade a market order pays for.

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The toxic flag

At or above 25% of recent profit lost to friction, a measured wallet carries a toxic badge. That is the signature of an edge earned on the maker side or on speed, neither of which a mirrored market order can capture. The P&L beside it is real; it simply is not transferable. The verdict is computed and stored server-side and is never re-derived from the percentage on screen — publication is guarded by the evidence rules below, and a client-side comparison would light up wallets the engine deliberately declined to judge. A badge only ever appears for a wallet that was measured and judged.

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Blank means unmeasured, never clean

Ballista publishes nothing rather than a number the next dollar of P&L would swing by tens of percent. Any one of these suppresses it: The profile names which guard fired rather than showing a bare dash.
A negative slip is real, and it is not a compliment: the replay came out level with or ahead of the wallet’s own fills, which mostly happens on a wallet whose losing positions a taker would have been out of sooner. It is a statement about execution over those 30 days, not an endorsement of the P&L beside it.

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What else to weigh

Taker share and copy friction answer “can this be copied, and what would it cost”. These answer “is it worth copying”:
  • Recent P&L over lifetime P&L. An eight-figure lifetime number belonging to a wallet that stopped trading two years ago is a fact about the past. Ballista leads with the 30-day figure everywhere for that reason.
  • The execution profile — median hold, average entry price, how often the wallet hedges by buying both outcomes, and its record over the last 20 markets.
  • A backtest. The only way to see what your configuration would have done with their flow, rather than what they did with theirs.
Every one of these stays a separate number. Ballista publishes no composite score and no overall grade for a wallet: a blended figure would hide exactly the disagreement between two of them — a great P&L and a toxic slip rate, say — that you most need to see.

Trader profiles

Lifetime stats, 30-day stats, and the execution profile.

The leaderboard

Who appears on it, and what it ranks on.

Backtesting

Replay their real trades through your configuration.

Copy trade settings

The filters that shape what you actually take from their flow.