Why Is My Bot Not Trading?

Open your Bots page and look at the Status column. It is a diagnosis, not an on/off light, and it usually ends the investigation in one glance. "Running", "Waiting for trader" and "Trader inactive" all mean the bot is armed and there is nothing wrong with it. "Paused by you" waits for you to press Resume. "Stopped" is final — that bot will not trade again, so create a new one. Everything else names its own cause and is covered below.

If the status reads "Out of cash" or "Low funds", this is the whole answer. Look at the Cash figure in the Polycopy top bar — it sits beside portfolio value and they are different numbers. Money inside open positions cannot buy anything. A Real bot needs at least $10 of spendable pUSD to keep running, and once you fund it the system re-checks and resumes on its own, usually within about half an hour. You do not need to press anything.

This is the second-cheapest check and the most common answer. Open the bot, then open the trader from the bot's page and look at their recent trades. A Trader Bot only reacts to NEW qualifying trades — it does nothing about positions the trader already held when you started, and a trader who is merely holding is a trader with nothing to copy. The status word "Trader inactive" means we have seen no qualifying activity from them for a week.

Open the bot and review Capital, Setup & settings, and Health & limits. Three things stop a funded bot here. Capital fully deployed into open positions leaves nothing to place with — that clears by itself as positions resolve. "Daily budget used" means the day's spend is gone and it resets tomorrow. A bot whose Max Open Exposure is set below its budget will likewise wait once its open positions reach that line rather than add.

A status of "Filters blocking" with reasons that read "Book spread … exceeds cap" means the trader bought into a market whose buy–sell gap was wider than the bot's Max Spread (baseline 200 bps, about 2% of the price). That refusal is the bot protecting you: thin markets are where copies lose for every grade of trader. If a trader you copy lives in thin markets, the honest fix is a different trader, not a wider setting — raising Max Spread buys volume at a measured loss.

A status of "Filters blocking" says exactly this: the trader traded, and none of it became an order. On a Custom bot the usual causes are min conviction, min win rate, a narrow price range, max resolution days, cooldown, or max trades per day. Relax them one at a time so you learn which one it was. Selective, Balanced, Broad share one measured baseline and carry no per-trade filters at all, so this step does not apply to them.

A status of "Premium required" means the subscription lapsed — through cancellation, a failed payment, or the end of a grace period — and Real Trading bots pause until it is active again. Check Settings. Paper bots keep running to their scheduled end regardless.

"Wallet issue" means the key Polycopy signs with does not match the Polymarket account it is supposed to trade for. "Wallet setup needed" means the connection was never finished. Both are fixed in Settings: compare the trading wallet address shown there against the account on polymarket.com/portfolio, and reconnect with the key for the account you actually fund. System pauses re-check on their own and resume once the cause clears — a bot you paused yourself never does.

"Execution issue" means orders reached the exchange and did not fill. Open the bot and check Pending, Closed, and Health & limits. The usual causes are price moving past your slippage tolerance between the trader's fill and yours, a book too thin for the size, a market that stopped accepting orders, an order under the market's own minimum, or Polymarket restricting the account or region. Widening slippage from the 7% default helps with the first of those and nothing else — and only widen it if you would still want the trade at the worse price.

If none of the above explains it, use the Get Help form (the ? icon in the top navigation, or /help#contact) or email help@polycopy.app. Send the bot name, the trader it copies, the exact status word shown on your Bots page, one specific trade you expected it to copy with roughly when it happened, and your current Polymarket Cash figure. Those five things let us separate a quiet trader from a balance, rules, wallet, or execution problem without a round of questions.