A trader's total profit and loss can hide where the money actually came from. Open the Categories tab on any profile in Banana Predict and the wallet splits into lanes: share of trades, volume, and profit or loss per category. A wallet that shows +$5.5M for the month can be carrying a category underneath it that lost close to a million dollars. Copying the whole wallet means copying both lanes. Reading the Categories tab first lets you copy the one that works and skip the one that does not.
Where the Categories tab lives and what it shows
Click any name on the Leaderboard and the trader's profile opens. One of the tabs across the top reads Categories.
Tap it and you get a row per category: share of that trader's activity, number of trades, volume, and profit or loss.
Djdjdjekekek's Banana Predict profile showing Esports at plus 2.6 million and Sports at minus 917.6 thousand">
Djdjdjekekek's Categories tab: one lane funds the other.
You can check this yourself. Open a trader's profile in Banana Predict and tap Categories before you tap Copytrade.
Categories sits next to the Performance tab, which covers win rate and ROI for the last 50 closed trades, with maker and taker rebates listed underneath. Categories breaks the same wallet down by market type instead.
The profile header above both tabs already shows VOLUME, PORTFOLIO VALUE, BIGGEST WIN and the PREDICTIONS count. Categories adds the layer those totals hide: where inside the book the money actually came from.
The rank 1 example: one wallet, two different traders
Djdjdjekekek sits at rank 1 on the monthly Leaderboard with +$5.5M in profit and loss on $101.3M of volume, as of late August 2026. The total reads like one trader having a strong month.
The Categories tab tells a different story. Esports is 57% of the activity, 64 trades, +$2.6M. Sports is 43%, 36 trades, -$917.6K.
You can trace the same split by opening Djdjdjekekek's profile in Banana Predict and tapping the Categories tab.
Djdjdjekekek joined in June 2026 and has 402 predictions behind the profile, so this split sits inside an active book rather than a handful of trades.
Inside one wallet there is a trader who wins at Esports and a trader who loses at Sports. The rank alone never tells you that, a point covered from a different angle in why rank 1 by profit and loss is usually the worst wallet to copy.
The pure specialist: vananal0318 trades one category only
vananal0318 shows 100% Esports on the profile header, with $5.9M in lifetime volume across 668 predictions since joining in December 2024.
On the last 50 closed trades: 64% win rate, +2% ROI, 32 winning positions, and a biggest loss of -$5.4K. There is no second category to check.
vananal0318: one category, so there is no split to weigh, only the ROI.
Specialization is necessary here, but it is not sufficient on its own. A 64% win rate reads well, yet +2% ROI on the same window means the edge is thin. The six-point profile check in how to find profitable Polymarket wallets to copy still applies to a one-category wallet.
The drifting trader: betterfasterstronger spreads thin
betterfasterstronger joined in August 2026 and sits inside the monthly top 20, with $6.1M in lifetime volume across 1,173 predictions.
The Categories tab shows EPL at 46% (31 trades, -$66.4K), Politics at 27% (3 trades, -$31.7K), and Soccer at 23% (51 trades, -$3K).
Three categories, none of them profitable on this window.
Three trades in Politics is a small sample that landed badly. Treat a category with only a handful of trades as noise, not as proof of skill or its absence.
betterfasterstronger's past week showed -$36.2K in PnL with 200 active positions open at once. Spread across three categories on a book that size, the losing lane is easy to miss from the profile header alone.
The Performance tab does not rescue it either. On the last 50 closed trades the win rate is 26% at +11% ROI, a wallet whose few wins pay well but whose category lines are all negative.
How to filter the Leaderboard by category before you open a profile
The Leaderboard's FILTER panel has a Category selector: All, Politics, Sports, Crypto, Culture, Weather, Economics, Tech, Finance. Set it alongside Sort By, which only offers Profit/Loss or Volume.
Filter by category on the list, then confirm the split on the profile.
Filtering the list by Sports surfaces traders active in that category recently, but it does not show what share of their overall book that activity represents. For that you still need the profile.
Sort By still only offers Profit/Loss or Volume, even with a Category set. Sorting by Profit/Loss inside Sports surfaces the biggest movers in that one category, not the most consistent ones.
The workflow runs in two steps. Filter the Leaderboard by a category to build a shortlist, then open each profile and check the Categories tab.
That second step tells you whether the category is a real lane or a handful of trades. A broader walk through the list itself is in how to find and follow the top traders on the Polymarket leaderboard.
Three traders, one tab, three different reads
Note: vananal0318 trades one category, so there is no split to read, only the overall ROI and win rate from the last 50 closed trades.
FAQ
Can I copy only one category of a trader?
The profile shows you the category split so you can judge which lane is worth following. The Copytrade screen itself requires login, and its options are not covered here. For the full setup, see how to copy trade on Banana Predict.
What share counts as a specialist?
vananal0318 sits at 100% Esports, a pure specialist by any read. Djdjdjekekek splits 57/43 between Esports and Sports, and betterfasterstronger splits three ways. A wallet spread across two or three categories at meaningful trade counts is not a specialist, even when one lane is profitable.
Why is a category with 3 trades misleading?
betterfasterstronger's Politics line shows 27% share but only 3 trades, for -$31.7K. Three trades can swing entirely on one bad call, so the percentage and the dollar loss look meaningful while the sample is too small to say anything about skill in that category.
Start with one profile
Open any profile in Banana Predict and tap Categories before you tap anything else.
