Glossary of terms

Paper bot / Paper mode

A bot that trades on real, live Polymarket market data but with a virtual balance. Same signals, same logic as a live bot — nothing at risk.

Dry Run

A mode between paper and live: the bot connects to the real exchange and generates real trading signals, but places no orders.

Live bot

A bot trading with real funds on Polymarket. Identical logic to its paper twin — only the money is real.

Circuit breaker

A hard, user-configured drawdown limit that stops a live bot automatically once losses reach it.

Panic stop

An instant, manual stop for all of your bots at once, triggered from the dashboard.

Drawdown

The decline from a strategy’s peak balance to a subsequent low — the standard way to measure how bad a losing streak got.

Backtest

Replaying a strategy against historical Polymarket market data to see whether it would have made money, in under a minute.

Walk-forward validation

Re-testing a strategy on data it wasn’t tuned on, to check whether good backtest results are real or just overfitting.

Monte Carlo stress test

Shuffles historical trade outcomes to show the range of results a strategy could realistically produce, not just the one path it happened to take.

Out-of-sample holdout

A slice of historical data kept untouched during tuning, reserved for one final, unbiased check.

Risk-adjusted metrics (Sharpe / Sortino / Ulcer Index)

Ratios that measure return relative to the risk taken to get it, so two strategies with the same profit can still be told apart by how bumpy the ride was.

MAE / MFE

Maximum Adverse/Favorable Excursion: how far a trade moved against you, or in your favor, before it closed — useful for judging whether your stop-loss and take-profit levels are set sensibly.

Orderbook imbalance (OBI)

The relative pressure of buy vs. sell orders sitting in Polymarket’s order book — a signal for which direction is likely to move next.

CLOB (central limit order book)

The order-matching structure Polymarket runs on — the same kind professional exchanges use — where buy and sell orders are matched by price and time priority.

Taker fee

The small fee Polymarket charges on trades that remove liquidity from the order book. It isn’t flat — it’s close to zero near the extremes and highest around 50¢, where the outcome is most uncertain.

Take-profit / Stop-loss (TP/SL)

The price levels at which a strategy automatically closes a position — locking in a gain (take-profit) or cutting a loss (stop-loss).

Maker/taker ratio

The share of a strategy’s orders that add liquidity to the book (maker) versus remove it (taker) — makers typically pay lower or no fees.

Cumulative volume delta (CVD)

A running tally of buy volume minus sell volume over time, used as a signal for building or fading market activity.

Bayesian P(yes)

The constructor’s statistical estimate of the probability that a market resolves “yes”, updated as new data comes in.

Black-box strategy

A strategy marketplace listing you can run exactly as published, but can’t view or edit the underlying rules of.

Tunable strategy

A strategy marketplace listing sold with its full, editable configuration, so you can adjust it after buying.

Leaderboard

The public ranking of live bots by performance — profit, win rate, drawdown and more — used to discover and vet strategies before buying them.

USDC

A US-dollar-pegged stablecoin. The currency you fund bot wallets with to trade live on Polymarket.

Market duration

How long a Polymarket market runs before it resolves — 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours or 24 hours are the options Gogobots trades.

Resolution

The moment a market settles to its final outcome; the winning side’s shares pay out $1 each.