Most people arrive at Polymarket with an opinion, not a plan. They find a market they feel strongly about, put money on it, and repeat. That works until it does not, because prediction markets settle to a binary outcome: a position either resolves at 100c or at zero. There is no partial credit and no slow bleed to warn you.

That binary structure is exactly why a plan matters more here than in most markets. Without one, the two decisions that determine your results, how much to allocate and when to exit, get made in the moment, under pressure, on the markets you feel most certain about. Certainty is a poor guide to sizing.

A plan is not a prediction. It is a set of decisions you make once, calmly, so you are not making them repeatedly under stress.

A usable plan does not need to be long. It needs to answer five questions before you place a trade:

The builder below turns those five decisions into a concrete starting plan based on your risk tolerance, available time, capital and the categories you actually follow.

Eight questions, about 60 seconds. You will get a personalized allocation across market types, an estimate based on your capital, a screener recipe and a set of risk rules. No email and no account required.

Your result splits capital across five approaches. Each one has a different risk profile, and the mix is what makes a plan yours rather than generic:

• Banker. High-probability markets trading above about 85c and heading toward resolution. Small percentage gains, high hit rate. This is the compounding base of a conservative plan.
• Sniper. Markets where a fair-value gap and smart-money positioning agree. Dual confirmation means fewer opportunities but a stronger case for each one.
• Moonshot. Large gaps between price and estimated fair value. Asymmetric payoff, low hit rate. Sized small on purpose, because most of these lose.
• Smart money. Following where consistently profitable wallets are concentrated, rather than starting from your own fair-value estimate.
• Radar. Reacting to large trades from proven wallets in real time. Only realistic if you can actually act quickly, which is why availability changes your mix.

Allocation decides your shape; position sizing decides whether you survive to see it work. Three rules do most of the work:

Cap any single market before you enter

Decide the maximum share of your bankroll a single market can take, and set it while you are neutral. The specific number matters less than having one: a fixed cap is what stops a single resolution from defining your month. Speculative positions should be capped well below high-probability ones, because their hit rate is much lower by design.

Size by market type, not by conviction

Conviction is the least reliable input you have. The markets you feel most certain about are the ones where you are most likely to have missed a resolution detail. Let the market type set the size and let your research decide whether to enter at all.

Limit exposure per category

Five separate positions on the same election are one position wearing five hats. Cap total exposure per category so correlated markets cannot all resolve against you at once. This is the mistake that most often turns a good month into a bad quarter.

A plan is a starting position, not a finished product. Run it for a few weeks, keep a simple record of what you entered and why, then review. The goal of the first month is not profit, it is finding out which parts of the plan you actually follow.

From here, the strategy guide covers the pre-entry check in more detail, the fair-value guide explains how to judge whether a price is wrong, and the free 13-chapter Polymarket Playbook walks through the fundamentals from the beginning.