Ballista is not an exchange
Prices, liquidity, fills, market resolution and settlement are all Polymarket’s. If a market resolves in a way you disagree with, or a fill went worse than you expected because the book was thin, that is the exchange — Ballista cannot change it, reverse it, or compensate for it.There is no withdrawal screen
There is no withdraw button in the Telegram bot, the web terminal or the extension. Not hidden, not gated — it does not exist. The way out is Export Keys: take your private key, import it into a wallet you control, sign in to Polymarket with it, and withdraw there. Note that the key’s own address will look empty in a wallet app — your balance is held by the Polymarket proxy wallet that key controls, which is why the route runs through Polymarket rather than a plain send. Deposits are one-way as far as Ballista’s interface is concerned.There is no sign-up outside Telegram
Accounts are created by sending/start to the Telegram bot, and only there. The
terminal and the extension sign in with the Telegram login widget to an account
that already exists; if it does not, they tell you to register in the bot. There
is no email sign-up, no password, and no way to attach a Ballista account to
anything other than a Telegram account.
Backtests do not simulate take-profit or stop-loss
Take-profit and stop-loss work on live copy trades. They are not simulated. The simulator only knows prices at the moments the trader you are copying actually traded, and a stop-loss needs a continuous price path between those moments to be meaningful. Rather than quietly ignore the settings, the backtester rejects a configuration that carries them — a result labelled “with a stop-loss” for a run that never had one is worse than an error message. See Backtest fidelity for the full list of what the simulator does and does not model.Live slippage and backtest slippage are different numbers
They share a name and mean opposite things.
A live tolerance of 30 costs nothing unless the market actually moved. The same
30 in a backtest is a guaranteed 30% haircut on every fill. Do not carry one
number across to the other, and note that deploying a backtested configuration
as a live copy trade does not carry the simulated value into the live setting.
A blank slip cell is not a clean one
Ballista does publish a copy-friction figure — slip — and a toxic flag beside it on the leaderboard and on trader profiles. Both are measured on Ballista’s own engine, by replaying a wallet’s own recent fills as a taker and comparing the result against the same wallet’s own profit over the same markets. Neither is a third-party score. What Ballista will not do is fill them in when it cannot measure them. A wallet needs enough settled markets in the window, a profit large enough for a ratio to mean anything, and a fee schedule for every market in it. Short of that the cell stays blank. Slip is also not something you can rank on: it is a column you read, not a sort key. Choosing a trader explains what the number means and how to use it.There is no composite score or grade
The leaderboard ranks by one transparent metric at a time, and the value it sorted on is shown in the same row. There is no blended score, no letter grade, no star rating — nothing that turns several measurements into one number whose recipe you cannot see.A blank statistic means unmeasured, never zero
Where a trader metric has not been computed for a wallet, it renders as — with an explanation of what would fill it in. It never renders as 0. A dash is “we have not measured this”, not “this is zero” — see Trader profiles.Features are not on every surface
This is deliberate, not a rollout in progress.Other things worth knowing
What to read next
Limits
The numeric bounds — minimums, caps and windows.
Getting help
Where to write, and what to include.