Disclosure first since this sub asks for: I’ve studied hundreds to thousands wallets manually to find good ones but got lazy. I’m building a SOL/BSC and ETH wallet analytics tool called Vabulo. The process below is what led me to build it, but you can do all of it manually with block explorers and spreadsheets. This is no financial advice, past performance does not predict future results. Do your own research.

One thing I stopped doing was ranking wallets purely by total profit.

A wallet showing $500k in profit is not automatically a good wallet to follow.

Maybe it started with several million dollars.

Maybe most of the profit came from one lucky token.

Maybe the wallet received tokens before they became publicly tradable.

Maybe the current unrealized PnL is hiding several bad positions.

A smaller wallet that consistently turns modest positions into profit can sometimes be much more interesting.

That’s normally where I start.

I look at the wallet’s recent trading history and try to understand what “normal” performance looks like for it.

Then I look for changes:

s the wallet suddenly increasing its position sizes?

– Is it entering a new token category?

– Is the win rate improving or falling?Is it holding positions longer than usual?

– Is most of the PnL realized or still unrealized?

– Are profits coming from repeatable trades or one extreme outlier?

The raw PnL number is usually the least interesting part.

For example, a wallet may show a high win rate because it sells tiny profitable positions while keeping large losing positions open.

Another wallet may have a lower win rate but still make more money because its winners are much larger than its losses.

That’s why I normally look at several metrics together:

Realized PnL Unrealized PnL Win rate Average profit per winning trade Average loss per losing trade Position size Holding time Trading fees Token liquidity Number of trades

Sample size matters too.

A wallet with an 80% win rate across five trades tells you almost nothing.

A wallet maintaining a 60% win rate across hundreds of trades is much more interesting, especially when the profits are distributed across different tokens and time periods.

I also check whether the wallet’s trades were realistically reproducible.

A wallet can look extremely profitable while trading tokens with almost no liquidity.

If entering after the wallet would cause massive slippage, the historical performance may be real for that wallet but useless as a research signal for anyone else.

Timing is another important factor.

Some wallets buy minutes before a token moves.

Others build positions over several days.

The first may look more impressive, but the second can be easier to study because the opportunity did not disappear immediately after the transaction.

I also avoid assuming that every profitable wallet is a skilled trader.

There are several possible explanations:

The wallet belongs to a project contributor It received tokens through an OTC agreement It is connected to several other wallets It transferred assets from a centralized exchange It benefited from an airdrop It simply got lucky once

Public blockchain data gives you a lot of information, but it rarely gives you the complete story.

The useful part is not finding a wallet with a large green number.

It is finding repeatable behavior.

For me, the strongest signal is usually when several independent wallets with good historical records begin showing similar behavior.

One wallet buying a token can be noise.

Several historically consistent wallets entering the same category, increasing position sizes or changing their trading behavior can be worth investigating.

Doing this manually gets slow very quickly.

You have to open transactions, identify swaps, calculate cost bases, separate transfers from trades, find historical prices and compare the wallet’s current behavior against its previous activity.

That’s why I started building the process into Vabulo..

If you want to look at it: https://vabulo.com

Vabulo tracks historically high-performing Solana wallets, estimates onchain PnL and win rates, and highlights notable wallet activity and trading patterns.

It does not execute trades or automatically copy wallets.

The goal is to make public onchain data easier to research before making your own decisions.

I’m currently trying to understand which metrics people actually find useful and which ones only make a dashboard look more sophisticated.

For people who already track wallets:

How do you decide whether a profitable wallet is genuinely skilled or simply lucky?

And which metric do you trust most: realized PnL, win rate, consistency, position sizing or something else?

Solo founder. AMA.

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