Prediction Markets Weekly Digest: 12 of Polymarket’s 20 Sharpest Traders All Trade the Same Thing

TL;DR

This week in prediction markets, our new Top Traders leaderboard turned up something we did not expect: 12 of Polymarket’s 20 most accurate wallets all trade esports, not politics or crypto.

Three things to watch:

• 🗳️ The South Carolina Senate GOP primary result, expected August 11
• 🎮 Team Falcons vs K27 at the Esports World Cup on August 12
• 🌍 Whether the US announces an end to Iran’s blockade by August 15

New on Predictionist

Two new pages went live on the site this week, and they talk to each other.

Top Traders is a live leaderboard of Polymarket wallets that are systematically more accurate than the market itself, not just the ones with the biggest profit. Polymarket already runs its own P&L leaderboard, but big profit alone does not prove skill, a wallet that only ever bets on favorites can rack up a huge balance while telling you nothing useful.

We rank instead by edge: how much better a wallet’s calls are than the price the market itself was already quoting at the time. Buying in at 85% and winning 85% of the time is not skill, the market had already priced that outcome. Buying in at 51% and winning 61% of the time is. One surprise the ranking turned up on its own: 12 of the current top 20 wallets specialize in esports, not politics or crypto, and the single most accurate wallet on the board trades weather markets almost exclusively.

Upsets is the live version of the “biggest flips” section below, a continuously updated feed of markets that resolved against the odds, refreshed automatically instead of waiting for Monday. It is also linked to Top Traders: if one of the ranked wallets was positioned on a given upset, the card shows a badge linking straight to that wallet’s spot on the leaderboard, so you can see who actually called it.

Last week’s biggest flips

Tennis and esports drove most of the week’s upsets, with one geopolitical shock breaking up the pattern – zero ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz, an outcome priced at just 4% a week out. This section breaks down the week’s biggest flips: markets where the winning outcome was priced under 35% seven days before resolution.

Opportunity to make money this week

The calendar mixes a contested Senate primary with a slow-burning Iran blockade story and one lopsided esports match. These are the markets still carrying real uncertainty into the week.

Whale moves and big plays

One trader, BreakTheBank, staked $608K against Manchester City repeating as Premier League champions on August 5, a single-season bet that will not resolve until next May. The market has drifted further their way since, with Manchester City‘s title odds now down to 27%, from a field that also has Arsenal at 40% and Chelsea in the mix. A wallet making a season-long call like this is not chasing a same-week payout, it is being paid to sit through months of noise before the market catches up.

⚠️ Predictionist Tip: A bet that will not settle for the better part of a year is a different animal from a same-week flip. Before copying a whale’s season-long position, check whether you can actually stomach holding it through the drawdowns that come before the market agrees with you.

Prediction market industry news

Trump Media Scraps Its Own Prediction Market Before It Really Launched

I did not expect the company pushing hardest to normalize betting-adjacent products on social media to be the one that walked away first. Trump Media ended its “Truth Predict” partnership with Crypto.com on August 7, unwinding a plan to make Truth Social the first major social platform with built-in prediction markets, and scrapped a $6.4 billion crypto treasury deal with the same partner in the same move, per Bloomberg. The companies cited shifting priorities rather than competition, but the timing is hard to miss, this lands the same week Polymarket and Kalshi are both chasing valuations north of $20 billion in the same market Trump Media just backed out of building itself.

Polymarket Chases a $20 Billion Valuation

Polymarket is in early talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation above $20 billion, according to a Bloomberg report on August 4. That would more than double the $9 billion valuation it carried in October 2025, and follows a April round at $15 billion that brought in D.E. Shaw and G Squared. Kalshi, for context, is reportedly chasing double that figure, near $40 billion, so Polymarket is still playing catch-up on paper even as its own regulated US exchange grows.

Kalshi Brings In Compliance Tech to Police Insider Trading

What strikes me here is the timing relative to who is involved. Kalshi struck a partnership with compliance firm Comply on August 4, giving the more than 5,000 firms that already use Comply’s software the ability to flag employee trades on Kalshi event contracts for insider-trading risk. The company says it opened over 150 insider-trading investigations in Q1 2026 alone, including a case involving former Congressman George Santos, per Fortune. The context that makes this land differently: Donald Trump Jr. sits as a paid advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket at the same time his family’s own media company is pulling back from the space.

Quick answers