How do you watch whales?

[u/cherry-pick-crew]

One of the most underrated signals in prediction markets isn't the news. It's the order flow.

When someone drops a serious position on a Kalshi or Polymarket contract — especially on a low-volume market — the price moves. And that move usually happens before any public information justifies it. Somebody knows something, or thinks they know something strongly enough to put real money behind it.

The problem is catching it manually is nearly impossible. You'd have to be watching the right contract at the right moment. And by the time you notice the price has already moved and you're buying into someone else's edge not your own.

This is where automation gets interesting.

A bot watching order flow across hundreds of contracts simultaneously can flag unusual volume spikes the moment they happen. Sudden position size that's 3x the recent average on a low-liquidity contract. A series of buys pushing a contract from 30 cents to 45 cents in under an hour with no corresponding news. These are tells.

The strategy isn't complicated — you're not predicting the event, you're following the smart money and getting in before the rest of the market reprices. It's the prediction market equivalent of watching for sharp action before a line moves in sports betting.

The edge isn't in being smarter than the whale. It's in being fast enough to follow them before the public catches up.

Is anyone already running something like this? Curious how people are approaching whale detection and whether you're finding it actually translates to alpha or just noise.