What 'smart money' is not
A field guide to the four most common false signals retail follows, and why our score deliberately discounts them.
Size, early entries, VC wallets, influencers none of these are signal. Repeatable performance across uncorrelated bets is.
The phrase 'smart money' has been worn so thin it now means nothing. Four patterns get mistaken for it constantly, and none of them earn weight in how we score a wallet.
One: large wallets. Size is not skill. There are multi-million-dollar wallets with dismal records, and their size makes their mistakes more visible rather than less likely.
Two: early movers on a single token. Survivorship bias dressed up as alpha. Someone was always first into the thing that worked; that fact is only interesting if they are repeatedly early into things that work.
Three: VC wallets. Their edge is allocation access, not market timing. Following them into secondary markets is usually following them into exits.
Four: influencer wallets. Self-explanatory.
What we do count is the trailing performance of a wallet across many independent decisions, whether the wallets in a cluster are genuinely separate actors, whether the capital committed is meaningful relative to what the token can absorb, and whether the pattern itself is coherent rather than a coincidence of timing. Those are inputs we publish by name on the methodology page. Their weights, and the thresholds around them, stay internal but the list of what counts is not a secret, and neither is the list of what does not.