Everything you need to configure, optimize, and master your automated Polymarket copy trading bot. From first wallet connection to advanced API integrations.
New to Specula? Start with the Quick Start section. Your bot can be live and copying trades in under 5 minutes. For API access, visit the API Reference. See what's changed in the Changelog.
Specula is a non-custodial Polymarket copy trading platform. There is no registration, no KYC, and no email required. Your identity is your wallet address. Here's how to get started in four steps:
Visit specula.app/app and click Connect Wallet. Specula supports MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase Wallet, and any EIP-1193 compatible browser extension. You will be prompted to sign a message — this signature proves wallet ownership and never costs gas.
Select Shadow Trader ($49/mo), Alpha Hunter ($99/mo), or Whale Protocol ($149/mo). Send the exact USDC amount to the displayed address on Ethereum mainnet or BNB Chain. Your subscription activates automatically within 60 seconds of on-chain confirmation — no manual steps needed.
Browse the curated leaderboard or paste any Polymarket wallet address into your custom tracking list. Filter by ROI, win rate, or market category. Enable Conviction Score filtering (Alpha Hunter+) to only copy trades where the whale commits meaningful portfolio capital.
Set your copy multiplier, per-trade maximum, daily loss limit, and which features to enable. Click Activate Bot. Your automated trading bot begins monitoring selected wallets immediately. You will receive a notification on each trade execution.
Specula uses EIP-1193 wallet authentication. No private keys, emails, or personal data are ever requested during connection.
When you connect, Specula requests you sign an off-chain message. This message contains a timestamp and a nonce. The signature proves you control the wallet without revealing your private key and without spending gas. The signed message looks like this:
You can connect multiple wallets to Specula — each wallet maintains an independent subscription and bot configuration. Your bot executes trades from whichever wallet is active. We strongly recommend using a dedicated trading wallet separate from your primary holdings.
You can disconnect your wallet at any time from the dashboard settings. Your subscription data, tracked wallets, and configuration are preserved for 12 months after last activity even if you disconnect.
Specula subscriptions are paid in USDC on Ethereum mainnet or BNB Chain. After selecting your plan in the dashboard, you will see a recipient address and exact USDC amount. Send the payment from your connected wallet — the transaction hash is used to verify your subscription on-chain.
Tip: Always send the exact USDC amount shown. Sending a different amount will delay activation. Gas fees are paid separately and are not included in the subscription price.
Each subscription grants exactly 30 days of access from the moment of activation. Subscriptions are non-renewing by default — you must manually renew before expiry to maintain uninterrupted bot operation. You will receive notification alerts at 7 days, 3 days, and 24 hours before expiry.
To upgrade mid-cycle, pay the price difference for the remaining days of your current subscription to the same payment address, then select the higher plan in your dashboard. Your access upgrades immediately upon transaction confirmation.
The bot configuration panel controls how your automated trading bot sizes, filters, and executes copy trades. These settings apply globally across all tracked wallets unless overridden at the wallet level.
The copy multiplier scales the dollar amount of each mirrored trade relative to your portfolio size, not the tracked wallet's position size. A 1x multiplier means your trade size is proportional to what the whale committed as a percentage of their portfolio.
Sets a hard cap on any single trade executed by the bot, regardless of multiplier calculation. This is your most important safety setting. If the calculated trade size exceeds this cap, the bot executes at the cap amount.
You can whitelist or blacklist market categories to control which trades are copied. For example, you might copy trades in Elections and Crypto markets while skipping Entertainment and Sports.
Prevents copying trades in markets with insufficient liquidity. The bot will skip any position entry where the target market has less than your configured minimum USDC volume. Recommended minimum: $5,000 for stable execution.
Optionally filter out very new markets (less than X hours old) where price discovery is incomplete and manipulation risk is higher.
Your bot can be in one of three states: Active (monitoring and trading), Paused (monitoring but not trading), or Stopped (offline). Pausing is useful when markets are unusually volatile or when you want to review positions manually.
The Conviction Score Engine™ is Specula's most differentiating technology — a world-first system for measuring how committed a tracked wallet truly is to each trade, not just that a trade occurred.
Every Polymarket trade enters the engine. The engine calculates what percentage of the tracked wallet's total USDC portfolio is being committed to that single position. A whale deploying 40% of their portfolio to a single event carries exponentially more signal than a whale dipping 0.5% of their portfolio.
In your bot configuration, set a minimum conviction percentage. The bot will only copy a trade if the tracked wallet's conviction score meets or exceeds your threshold. Recommended starting value: 15–20%.
Beyond raw portfolio percentage, the full scoring model weighs: entry timing relative to market open, correlated wallet consensus (did other top wallets enter simultaneously?), historical win rate at this conviction level, market category track record, time-to-expiry, and current market liquidity. The resulting score is a composite from 0–100.
Pro tip: Combine the Conviction Score threshold with the Cascade Alert System™ for maximum signal quality — you only copy trades where a tracked wallet shows high conviction AND multiple elite wallets have entered the same position.
Exit Mirror™ is Specula's foundational innovation — the only system that replicates not just a whale's entry into a position, but also their exit. This closes the most dangerous gap in conventional copy trading.
Most copy trading platforms detect when a tracked wallet buys and replicate that buy. But they have no mechanism for detecting when that wallet sells or reduces their position. You are left holding a position indefinitely — long after the smart money has already exited.
Exit Mirror™ runs a continuous monitoring loop that watches not just for new positions from tracked wallets, but for any reduction in their existing positions. When a tracked wallet sells any portion of a position you are copying, Exit Mirror™ computes the proportional reduction and executes the matching sell in your portfolio within the same execution window.
Exit Mirror™ operates on the same execution pipeline as entry mirroring. Exit signals are typically executed within the same block window as the tracked wallet's exit transaction, subject to your plan's execution tier (<2s, <500ms, or <200ms).
You can always manually close any position from your dashboard, regardless of what tracked wallets are doing. Manually closed positions are flagged and not re-entered by the bot until cleared.
The Cascade Alert System™ detects convergence — the rare moment when multiple independent elite wallets enter the same prediction market position within a compressed time window. Historically, these convergence events are 73% more predictive of profitable outcomes than single-wallet signals.
A Cascade Alert fires when:
When a Cascade Alert fires, Specula prioritizes this signal over your standard copy parameters. The auto-execute size can be configured independently from your regular copy multiplier — many users allocate a higher percentage to Cascade trades given their historically higher accuracy.
Ghost Wallet Discovery™ surfaces the most valuable category of Polymarket traders — wallets with exceptional performance records that do not appear on any public leaderboard. These wallets represent untapped alpha that degrades the moment they become public knowledge.
Public leaderboards create a tragic dynamic: once a wallet appears on a leaderboard, thousands of users copy it simultaneously. The copytrading volume changes the market, eroding the edge that made the wallet profitable in the first place. Ghost wallets have never triggered this crowding effect — their signals remain clean.
Specula's on-chain analysis engine scans the full history of Polymarket trades — not just current leaderboard participants — and applies a multi-factor scoring algorithm:
Ghost Wallet lists are refreshed every 7 days. Wallets that migrate to public leaderboards are removed from the ghost list and replaced with newly discovered candidates. Alpha Hunter subscribers access the top 25 Ghost Wallets; Whale Protocol subscribers get unlimited access to the full discovery pool.
Contrarian Mode™ is a signal inversion engine that monitors retail sentiment on Polymarket and automatically bets against crowded retail positions when smart money simultaneously diverges.
Contrarian Mode activates when two conditions coincide: retail accounts collectively push a market to 80%+ on one side, while your tracked elite wallets (smart money) are simultaneously entering or maintaining positions on the opposite side. This divergence between crowd behavior and whale behavior is historically one of the highest-probability setups in prediction markets.
Risk note: Contrarian positions are inherently higher-risk. Markets can remain irrational longer than expected. Always apply strict size limits to contrarian trades. See the Risk Disclosure for full details.
Syndicate Mode™ is Specula's most advanced execution technology. When multiple Whale Protocol users are copying the same signal simultaneously, Syndicate Mode pools their orders into a single coordinated transaction, achieving dramatically better fills and zero self-inflicted slippage.
In thin prediction markets, even a modest number of copytraders hitting the same market simultaneously can move the price significantly against themselves. If 20 users each execute a $500 buy in the same low-liquidity market within seconds of each other, the later executions receive progressively worse prices — paying a premium caused by earlier copytraders, not the tracked whale.
When Syndicate Mode is active, your order is submitted to a shared order aggregator. Within a 2-second collection window, the aggregator pools all participating Whale Protocol users' orders for the same market and side, then executes a single combined transaction at the best available price, distributing fills proportionally.
Syndicate Mode is opt-in. You can enable or disable it per tracked wallet or globally. When disabled, your orders execute independently as standard copy trades. When enabled, you benefit from pooled execution but your order is subject to the 2-second aggregation window, which may cause slight entry delay vs. independent execution.
The Probability Arbitrage Scanner™ continuously monitors implied probabilities across Polymarket, Kalshi, and Manifold in real-time, detecting pricing discrepancies that represent genuine Polymarket arbitrage opportunities before the market corrects.
When Polymarket prices an event at 44% probability while Kalshi simultaneously prices the same event at 61%, a 17-point gap exists. The scanner flags this discrepancy, alerts you to the opportunity, and optionally auto-executes an arbitrage position on whichever platform shows the mispriced side.
Important: Cross-platform arbitrage carries execution risk, platform risk, and resolution divergence risk. Gaps often close before full execution. Review the Arbitrage Risk section of the Risk Disclosure carefully before enabling auto-execute.
Specula provides a layered risk management system. All limits are enforced at the execution layer — the bot will never exceed your configured limits regardless of signal strength.
Hard cap on any single trade. Even if the Conviction Score is 100% and a full Cascade Alert fires, the bot will not execute more than this amount per individual trade. Set this first before enabling the bot.
If cumulative losses across all automated trades for the current day exceed this threshold, the bot automatically pauses. You receive an immediate alert. The bot does not resume automatically — you must manually restart it from the dashboard. This forces a human review after significant drawdown.
Prevents any single market from consuming more than a defined percentage of your trading capital. If the bot would need to exceed this limit to mirror a trade, it scales the position down to the cap rather than skipping the trade entirely.
Limits how many concurrent open positions the bot can hold. When at maximum, the bot alerts on new signals but does not execute until an existing position closes.
Skips any market trading at extreme probabilities (e.g., below 3% or above 97%). These markets have asymmetric payout structures that may not match your risk profile even when a tracked wallet enters.
Recommended starting configuration: Per-trade max $100 · Daily loss limit $300 · Portfolio concentration 20% · Max open positions 10. Adjust after observing bot behavior for 2–3 weeks.
Specula supports four notification channels, available by plan. All notifications are opt-in and configurable per event type.
Provide an optional email address in dashboard settings. You will receive: trade execution confirmations, daily P&L summaries, subscription expiry warnings, and bot status alerts. Email is the only notification method that requires sharing personal data.
Enable web push notifications from your browser for real-time trade alerts without any personal data. Works on all modern browsers. Requires granting notification permission to specula.app. Push notifications fire within 2 seconds of a trade execution.
Connect Specula to your Telegram account via our bot. Each trade, Cascade Alert, and bot status change sends a formatted message to your chosen Telegram chat or channel. To enable: search @SpeculaBot on Telegram, send /start, and paste the returned chat ID into your dashboard.
Register a HTTPS endpoint URL to receive POST requests for every bot event. Useful for building custom dashboards, logging systems, or triggering additional automation. See the Webhook API reference for payload schemas and event types.
This is the single most important security practice. Create a dedicated Polymarket trading wallet that holds only the capital you intend to trade. Never use your primary cold wallet or hardware wallet with Specula. If your trading wallet is ever compromised, your primary holdings remain safe.
If you use bot auto-execution (which requires a stored private key), Specula encrypts your key at rest using AES-256. However, no software-based storage is perfectly secure. Limit the balance of any wallet whose key you provide to the platform — only keep what the bot needs to operate.
Always confirm you are on specula.app before connecting your wallet or signing any message. Phishing sites may mimic Specula's interface to steal wallet connections. Check the padlock icon and full URL bar.
Use tools like revoke.cash or etherscan.io/tokenapprovalchecker to audit and revoke any stale USDC spending approvals granted to Specula contracts. Good hygiene prevents forgotten approvals from being exploited if a contract is ever compromised.
Check your dashboard at least once daily while bot is active. Review executed trades for anomalies. The bot cannot protect against misconfigured parameters — human oversight is irreplaceable. Enable notifications so you are alerted to every trade.
Contact support at [email protected] or open an issue on GitHub. For real-time system status, check the Status page. For API-specific questions, see the API Reference.