How to Copy Trade on Ares Mobile
This guide covers the full copy-trading flow in the Ares mobile app: finding a trader, configuring a strategy across the six setup screens, 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.
Ares charges 1% on all prediction buys. Sells do not incur Ares fees. The minimum order size is $1.02.
1. Find a trader
Open the Leaderboard from the trophy icon in the bottom bar.
Three tabs: Following, Top Commenters, Top Traders. You can filter by category (Overall, Politics, Sports, Crypto, Weather), by timeframe (1D, 1W, 1M, All), and switch between Polymarket-wide rankings and Ares-only rankings.
Tap into anyone to see their profile: win rate, PnL, volume, biggest win, average trade size, best category. Below that, tabs for their Posts, Trades, Open Positions and Closed Positions.
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 Closed Positions and look at how they size, how long they hold, and whether their wins come from one category or from everywhere.
Two things 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.
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 This Trader.
2. Setup
Strategy Name. Defaults to their username. Rename it to something you will recognise later: "Sports Alpha", "Election Wallet", "Small size test". You will end up running several strategies at once and the dashboard only shows names.
Order Type
Market fills at whatever price is available right now. You get in, but you accept the price.
Limit only fills at your price or better. You might not get in at all.
Market is the default and the right choice for most people copying an active trader. If you are following someone who trades illiquid markets, Limit protects you from bad fills at the cost of missing some.
Presets. If you have saved a configuration before, it shows up here and fills in every tab at once. Worth building one or two once you know what you like.
3. Buy
This screen decides how much you put in every time your trader enters a position. It is the single most important tab.
Buy Size, four modes:
% of size copies a percentage of whatever they trade. Set 100% and you trade exactly what they trade, which means a whale's $5,000 position becomes your $5,000 position. Set 10% and you follow them at a tenth of their size.
Range sets a floor and a ceiling in dollars, so tiny trades still register and huge ones get capped.
Fixed $ puts the same dollar amount into every trade regardless of what they did. Simple, predictable, and it ignores their conviction entirely.
Match their risk sizes relative to their portfolio rather than their absolute dollars, so you follow the proportion of their bankroll they put at stake.
Orders below $1.02 are rejected. If you use Fixed $, set it at or above that. If you use % of size, note that a small percentage of a small trade can land under the minimum and get skipped: 10% of a $8 trade is $0.80 and will not fill.
If you are new, Fixed $ at a small number is the easiest to reason about. % of size is the closest to actually mirroring someone, but only if your bankroll is in the same league as theirs.
Budget. A hard cap on total spend for this strategy. Leave it blank or at 0 for no limit. Setting a budget is the simplest protection you have: the strategy stops buying when it hits the number, no matter what the trader does next.
Max slippage. Default is 6¢. This is how far the price can move against you before the order is abandoned. 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 wide on fast-moving ones where missing the trade entirely is worse.
Entry price range. Min and max, in cents. This is an underrated setting. Set a max of 60¢ and the strategy skips anything your trader buys above that price. The logic: a contract bought at 0.85 pays at most 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. Skip their 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 on chain, then places yours.
Priority fills a few seconds earlier by acting on unconfirmed mempool activity.
Those seconds are the difference between getting their price and getting the price after everyone else has reacted.
4. Sell
Copy their sells. On by default. Turn it off and every position stays open until you close it yourself, which means you have inherited their entries without their exits. That is rarely what you want.
Sell Size:
Same % sells the same proportion of your position that they sell of theirs. If they trim 30%, you trim 30%.
Fixed $ sells a set dollar amount each time.
Custom % sells a proportion you choose, regardless of what they did.
Sell max slippage. Same 6¢ default as the buy side. Worth keeping this looser than your buy slippage. Missing an entry costs you an opportunity; missing an exit leaves you holding something you meant to sell.
5. Markets
By default you follow the trader everywhere they go. This tab narrows that.
Categories. Leave on All, or switch to Only these or Exclude these and pick from Politics, Sports, Crypto, Culture, Mentions, Weather, Economics, Tech and Finance.
This is where you use what you learned from their profile. If their entire edge is in sports and they occasionally lose money guessing at politics, copy only sports.
Minimum 24h volume and Minimum liquidity. Filters 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 on this screen, set these.
Max resolution. Any, 1D, 7D, 30D, or a custom date. Only copy markets that resolve inside that window. Useful if you do not want your capital locked in a market that settles in six months.
6. Risk
Stop loss / Take profit, both in percent. Leave blank for neither.
Evaluate exits: Per Position or Portfolio. Per Position applies your stop loss and take profit to each market separately. Portfolio applies them to the strategy as a whole. Per Position is the safer default; Portfolio makes sense if you think of the strategy as one bet.
Max per trade. A ceiling on any single order, regardless of what your buy sizing calculates.
Max exposure per market. A ceiling on total money in one market. Stops a strategy from repeatedly adding to the same position until it is your entire balance.
Auto-redeem winnings. On by default. Claims payouts automatically when a market resolves so you do not have to remember.
Copy expiry. None, 1D, 7D, 30D, or a date. The strategy stops copying after this point. Good for testing someone: set 7D, see what happens, decide whether to continue.
7. Review and start
The Review screen gives you a plain-English summary at the top, something like "Copy aenews2's buys at 100% of their size, up to no limit. Sell when they sell."
Read that sentence. If it does not describe what you meant to build, go back.
Below it: who you are copying, your Buy, Sell, Markets and Risk configuration, and which wallet the strategy trades from.
Two buttons. Start Strategy turns it on now. Save as Preset stores the configuration so you can apply the same settings to the next trader in one tap.
Managing strategies
The Copy Trading dashboard lists everything you have running.
Each card shows the trader, the strategy status, how much you have spent against your budget, realised PnL, and the number of buys and sells. Pause and Resume are one tap.
Check this screen regularly. A strategy with 22 buys and 19 sells and a negative PnL 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.
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 slippage, and the fixes are in the Buy tab: tighter max slippage, an entry price cap, a minimum liquidity filter on the Markets tab.
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.