> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ballista.gg/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. > ## Agent Instructions > Ballista is a trading client for Polymarket, not an exchange. Every order Ballista places goes to Polymarket's CLOB. > There are three end-user surfaces — the Telegram bot, the web terminal and the Chrome extension — and they share ONE account and ONE balance. Never attribute a feature to a surface without checking that surface's source. > Every user registers in the Telegram bot first. The terminal and the extension sign in with the Telegram login widget. There is no other sign-up path. > Deposits arrive through EVM, Solana and Bitcoin bridge addresses and a Polymarket proxy wallet, with a $10 minimum. There is NO withdrawal UI — Export Keys is how a user takes custody of their funds. > Feature parity is uneven and must never be assumed. The full ~30-field copy-trade form exists only in Telegram; the terminal's copy form has 7 fields; the backtester, leaderboard and trader profiles are terminal-only; alerts and notifications are extension-only; referrals are Telegram-only. > Slippage means two different things. On a live copy trade it is a fill tolerance (default 30). In a backtest it is the simulated fill price (default 1). Deploying a backtest does not carry its slippage over to the live copy trade. > Take-profit and stop-loss run on live copy trades but are NOT simulated in backtests — the backtest API rejects those fields. > A backtest never places an order and never moves funds. Its fidelity caveats are published with every result and must be quoted, not paraphrased. > Leaderboard PnL is own-tape: harvested by Ballista from its own trade tape. The leaderboard sorts by one transparent metric at a time and there is NO composite score or grade. The sparkline exists only for harvested wallets — a blank sparkline means unmeasured, never zero. > Copy friction (slip) and a toxic flag DO exist and are own-engine: the wallet's own 30-day fills replayed as a taker (1% slippage per fill plus the real Polymarket taker fee schedule) against its actual 30-day PnL over the same fills, so the delta is pure friction. slip_pct is already a percentage, not a 0-1 fraction. The toxic flag is server-computed under evidence guards and is never re-derived client-side. Slip is not a sortable column. Blank means unmeasured — never zero and never clean. > Copyability is a taker share, reported in aggressive (≥60%), passive (≤30%) and mixed bands. It is never a score. > Do not document Feeds, the Twitter Tracker, the Telegram Settings button, percentage buy buttons, GTD orders, the Discord bot, or withdrawals. # What Ballista does not do > The limits, stated plainly, so none of them are a surprise later. Everything here is true today. None of it is hidden behind a setting you have not found. ## Ballista is not an exchange Ballista does not run a market, hold a book or match a trade. Every order it places is signed and handed to Polymarket's central limit order book. 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](/guides/wallet-and-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](/guides/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. | | Live copy trade | Backtest | | ---------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------- | | What it is | A **tolerance** on a fill-and-kill order — how far the book may have moved and still fill you, with a partial fill possible | The **fill price** assumed for every simulated fill | | Default | 30 | 1 | 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. A blank slip cell means **unmeasured**, never "no friction". A wallet with no toxic badge has not been cleared — it may simply never have been judged. Silence is not a verdict. Slip is also not something you can rank on: it is a column you read, not a sort key. [Choosing a trader](/guides/choosing-a-trader) explains what the number means and how to use it. ## There is no composite score or grade The [leaderboard](/guides/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](/guides/trader-profiles). ## Features are not on every surface This is deliberate, not a rollout in progress. | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **The Telegram bot cannot sell** | Every order the bot places is a buy. There is no sell action in a market and none on the positions screen, and no open-order list to cancel from. Close positions from the terminal or the extension. | | **Full copy-trade configuration is Telegram-only** | The bot exposes every setting the engine supports. The terminal has a short form covering the common case; the extension has no copy trading at all. | | **Backtester, leaderboard and trader profiles are terminal-only** | Not in the bot, not in the extension. | | **Price alerts and notifications are extension-only** | The bot and the terminal have no alerts screen. | | **Referrals are Telegram-only** | Your code, link, rates and pending rewards live in the bot. | | **Presets are terminal and extension only** | The bot has no preset list; orders there are entered each time. Only the extension can edit an existing preset. | | **Combined trade history is extension-only** | The terminal shows your fills per market, never as one list. The bot shows none at all. | ## Other things worth knowing | | | | ---------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **No paper trading** | Backtesting is the only simulation. Any order you place from any surface is real money on a live book. | | **No second factor** | Access to your Telegram account is access to your Ballista account, and your exported private key is the whole wallet. | | **Nothing is undoable** | A resting order can be cancelled from the terminal or the extension, but a fill cannot be reversed and a deposit cannot be recalled. | | **Notifications cannot be deleted** | Anything in the feed — a triggered price alert or a copy-trade notice — is cleared by marking it read. Only an alert itself can be deleted. | | **A claimed referral code is permanent** | It cannot be changed or released once set. | | **Referral attribution happens once** | Only when an account is created. Nobody can be re-attributed later. | ## What to read next The numeric bounds — minimums, caps and windows. Where to write, and what to include.