How to Copy Trade on Ares Mobile
This guide covers the full copy-trading flow in the Ares mobile app: finding a trader on the Discover page, starting a strategy with the quick setup, fine-tuning it in Advanced settings, and managing strategies once they are running.
Before you start
Download the app:
Sign in with your email, then fund your wallet. You can deposit crypto, or use a card or Cash App through the deposit flow.
Copy trading has a flat 1% fee, and 50% goes to the trader being copied. Manual trades have 0% Ares fees. The minimum order size is $1.02.
1. Find a trader
Tap the Copy Trading icon in the bottom bar (the one that looks like two overlapping squares). It opens the Discover page: a curated list of top traders, ranked by star rating. This is the quickest place to start copy trading.
Each card shows the trader's rank, star rating, ROI, win rate, PnL and average buys per day. Tap Copy on any card to go straight to setup. Use the 7D and 30D toggle to change the performance window.
To narrow the list, tap the filter button. You can set a minimum star rating (3+, 4+ or 4.5+), win rate (50%+, 55%+ or 60%+) and ROI (10%+, 25%+ or 50%+).
The button at the bottom shows how many traders match, and Reset clears everything.
Already know who you want to copy? Type a name or paste a Polymarket wallet address into the search bar at the top.
Want to browse beyond the curated list?
Open the Leaderboard from the trophy icon in the bottom bar. It has three tabs: Traders, Commenters and Following. You can filter by category (All, Politics, Sports, Crypto, Culture and more) and by timeframe (1D, 1W, 1M, All), and switch between Polymarket-wide and Ares-only rankings.
Tap into anyone to see their profile: all-time PnL, win rate, volume and best category. Below that are tabs for their Overview, Positions and Trades. The Overview shows a calendar of their daily PnL and a breakdown of where they trade.
Spend real time here. A high PnL on three trades is luck. A 70% win rate across 200 resolved markets is something you can reason about. Open their Positions and Trades and look at how they size, how long they hold, and whether their wins come from one category or from everywhere.
Two things are worth checking before you commit:
How often do they trade? A trader who takes one position a week is easy to follow. A trader who fires fifty orders an hour will fill your wallet with small positions and eat your budget fast. The Buys/day figure on each Discover card gives you a quick read.
What price do they enter at? Someone buying at 0.90 has very little upside left. Slippage hurts far more on those entries than on a 0.40 entry.
When you find someone, tap Copy their trades.
2. Quick setup
After you tap Copy (or Copy their trades on a profile), you land on one screen with sensible defaults already filled in. Most people can start copying from here without changing anything else. The trader you picked is shown at the top, and you can tap Change to pick someone different.
Your budget. The most this copy can ever spend. It stops when the budget runs out. Type an amount in USDC or tap $50, $100, $200 or Max. Your available balance is shown next to the "Your budget" label.
Trade size. Choose how much to put in each time your trader buys:
Fixed amount buys the same dollar amount every time, whatever they stake. The default is $10.
Proportional buys a percentage of whatever they put in.
Exit strategy. Choose when your positions close:
Follow trader (default): you sell when the trader sells. No stop loss or take profit.
Standard: stop loss at -20%, take profit at +50%.
Aggressive: stop loss at -30%, take profit at +100%.
Need more control? Tap Advanced settings for a per-market limit, categories to skip, slippage and more. See section 3.
When you are ready, tap Review copy settings. Only the trader's new trades are copied, and you can pause copying at any time.
3. Advanced settings
If the quick setup does not quite fit, tap Advanced settings.
It starts with your strategy name and any saved presets, followed by four sections: Buy, Sell, Markets, and Risk & exits. Anything you already set on the quick setup screen carries over.
Strategy name. Defaults to the trader's name followed by "Strategy". Rename it to something you will recognize later, such as "Sports Alpha" or "Small size test". You will likely end up running several strategies at once.
Saved presets. Presets you save with Save as Preset on the Review screen appear here as chips. Tap one and it fills in every setting with that preset's values, so you do not have to rebuild them for each trader. Give your strategy a clear name before saving, since that name is how you will recognize the preset later.
Advanced: Buy
Sizing method decides how much you put in each time your trader buys. There are four options:
Fixed amount puts the same dollar amount into every buy, regardless of what they did. Simple and predictable, though it ignores their conviction.
Percentage of their size buys a percentage of what they spend on each buy. At 100% you trade exactly what they trade, so a $5,000 position from them becomes a $5,000 position for you. At 10% you follow at a tenth of their size.
Percentage within a range works the same way, but keeps each buy between a minimum and maximum dollar amount, so tiny trades still register and huge ones get capped.
Match their risk scales your buys by your balance relative to theirs, so you put in the same share of your bankroll that they put in of theirs.
If you are new, a small Fixed amount is the easiest to reason about. Percentage of their size is the closest to actually mirroring someone, but only if your balance is in the same league as theirs.
Maximum per buy puts a ceiling on any single buy, whatever the sizing method calculates. There is no limit by default.
Orders below $1.02 are rejected. With a percentage method, a small share of a small trade can land under that minimum and get skipped: 10% of an $8 trade is $0.80 and will not fill.
Tap More buy settings for finer control:
Order type. Market (default) fills right away at the going price. You get in, but you accept the price. Limit lets you set a price, but the order may not fill. This applies to every order the strategy places, including stop-loss exits, so with Limit a stop loss may not always get you out when you expect. Market suits most people copying an active trader. If you follow someone who trades thin markets, Limit protects you from bad fills at the cost of missing some trades.
Max slippage. How far the price can move against you before the order is abandoned. The default is 6¢. Tighter means fewer bad fills and more missed trades. Looser means you get in more often and pay more for it. On a market trading at 0.50, 6¢ is 12% of your entry price, which is a lot. Consider tightening it on liquid markets and leaving it wider on fast-moving ones where missing the trade entirely is worse.
Entry price range. A minimum and maximum price, in cents. Set a max of 60¢ and the strategy skips anything your trader buys above that price. A contract bought at 0.85 pays at most about 18% if it resolves yes, and a few cents of slippage eats a third of that. The same slippage on a 0.40 entry barely dents it.
Minimum trade size to copy. Skips the trader's small trades. Useful when someone you follow makes a lot of tiny probing bets you do not want to mirror.
Fill signal. Standard waits for their trade to confirm, then places yours. Priority fills a few seconds earlier by acting on unconfirmed mempool activity. Those seconds can be the difference between getting their price and getting the price after everyone else has reacted.
Advanced: Sell
This section decides what happens when the trader you copy sells.
When they sell has four options:
Sell the same percentage (default): if they sell half, you sell half.
Sell a fixed amount: the same dollar amount every time they sell.
Sell a custom percentage: your own share of the position, every time they sell, whatever they sold.
Don't copy their sells: you close every position yourself. You inherit their entries without their exits, which is rarely what you want, so set a stop loss and take profit under Risk & exits if you choose this.
Under More sell settings, Sell max slippage works like the buy side, with the same 6¢ default. It is worth keeping this looser than your buy slippage. Missing an entry costs you an opportunity, while missing an exit leaves you holding something you meant to sell.
Advanced: Markets
By default you follow the trader everywhere they go. This section narrows that.
Market selection has three options:
All categories (default) follows the trader into every market they trade.
Only these categories copies only the categories you pick.
Exclude these categories copies everything except the categories you pick.
For the last two, tap Select categories and tick the ones you want from Politics, Sports, Crypto, Culture, Mentions, Weather, Economics, Tech and Finance.
Politics, Sports, Crypto, Culture and Finance can also be expanded for more specific options.
This is where you use what you learned from the trader's profile. If their edge is all in sports and they lose money guessing at politics, copy only sports, or exclude politics.
Under More market settings:
Minimum 24h volume and Minimum liquidity filter out thin markets. Thin books are where slippage does the most damage, because your order and theirs both move the price. If you set nothing else here, set these.
Max resolution (Any, 1D, 7D, 30D, or a custom date) only copies markets that resolve within that window, so your money is not locked in a market that settles in six months.
Advanced: Risk & exits
This section caps how much a strategy can spend and decides when positions close on their own.
Copy budget. The same budget you set on the quick setup screen. Enter 0 or leave it blank for no limit.
Maximum per market. The most you can have in any one market, so a strategy cannot keep adding to the same position until it is your entire balance. No limit by default.
Stop loss and Take profit. Both are off by default. Enter a percentage and each position sells on its own once it moves this far from its entry price. Leave a field blank to keep it off.
Under More risk settings:
Evaluate exits. Per position (default) checks each open position on its own. Portfolio checks the combined PnL across all of them. Per position is the safer default; Portfolio makes sense if you think of the strategy as one bet.
Auto-redeem winnings. On by default. Claims payouts automatically once a market resolves, so you do not have to remember.
Copy expiry. Stops copying after a set time: None (default), 1D, 7D, 30D, or a custom date. A 7D expiry is a good way to test a trader before committing longer.
4. Review and start
Tap Review copy settings to check everything before you commit.
At the top, a plain-English Summary describes what your strategy will do, for example: "Copy mooseborzoii's buys at 100% of their size, up to $100. Sell when they sell." Read that sentence. If it does not describe what you meant to build, go back and change it.
Below it, Configuration gives a quick overview of Buy (your sizing and order type), Sell, Markets and Risk & exits (your budget), followed by the Trading wallet the strategy will trade from.
Two buttons finish the job:
Start Strategy turns it on now. Only the trader's new trades are copied from this point.
Save as Preset stores these settings so you can reuse them for the next trader. Next time you copy someone, open Advanced settings and tap your preset under Saved presets.
5. Managing strategies
Tap the Copy Trading icon and switch to the My copies tab to see every strategy you have set up. Use the All, Active, Paused and Deleted filters at the top to narrow the list.
Each card shows the strategy name, when it last traded (or "No trades yet"), your PnL in percent and dollars, the trader's own result next to "Them", and a bar showing how much you have spent against your budget. Paused strategies are labelled "Paused".
Tap a card to see its details, and tap Copy a trader at the bottom to start a new one.
If you have not started a strategy yet, My copies shows a Copy a trader screen instead. From there, tap Browse leaderboard or Paste an address to pick someone.
Check this screen regularly.
A strategy that keeps trading while its PnL keeps falling is telling you something. Either the trader has gone cold, or your settings are wrong for how they trade, and both are worth acting on before the number gets bigger.
You can pause copying at any time.
A few things worth knowing
Start smaller than feels interesting. Your first strategy is a test of your settings as much as of the trader. Run it small for a week, look at the fills, then size up.
Watch your fill prices, not just your PnL. If you keep getting filled meaningfully worse than the trader you are copying, the problem is usually slippage. The fixes are in Advanced settings: a tighter max slippage and an entry price range under More buy settings, and a minimum liquidity filter under More market settings.
One trader is a bet, three is a strategy. Running several strategies at small size tells you more than one at large size.
Copying a good trader is not the same as making their returns. You enter after they do, at a slightly different price, and you exit the same way. The gap between their result and yours is real and it comes out of your side.