Pause vs Stop: Trader Bot Status
Difference between Pause and Stop on Polycopy Trader Bots. Pause keeps your positions; Stop sells them. When to resume, and when you must create a new bot.
Last updated August 21, 2026
Running
A running bot shows "Running" on your Bots page. It watches the trader and places copies when a trade passes your rules and execution succeeds. Two neighbouring words mean the same health: "Waiting for trader" (armed, nothing to copy yet) and "Trader inactive" (armed, the trader has been quiet for a week).
Pause — temporary, and it keeps your positions
Pause stops new copies and touches nothing you already hold. Open positions stay open, and you can press Resume whenever you like. Trades the trader made while you were paused are never copied retroactively; the bot picks up from the next eligible trade. On your Bots page a bot you paused reads "Paused by you", which is deliberately different from the words a system pause uses.
Stop — permanent, and it SELLS your open positions
The stop control on a Real bot is labelled "Stop bot & sell all positions", and that is exactly what it does: it deactivates the bot and then tries to sell every open position the bot holds, at whatever the market will pay right now. It is not a quieter Pause. The confirmation dialog says "this cannot be undone" because both halves are irreversible — the bot cannot be resumed, and the positions cannot be un-sold.
If you only want the copying to end
Use Pause and leave it paused. That is the control for "stop copying but let my positions run". A paused bot places nothing, costs nothing, and can sit indefinitely. Reach for Stop only when you actually want out of the trades as well.
What a Stop leaves behind
Selling is best-effort, so the result screen reports how many of your positions actually sold. A position under the exchange's 5-share floor cannot be sold at any price and will stay in your Polymarket account until the market resolves; so will anything in a market that has stopped accepting orders. Those are not errors, and they still pay out normally if they win.
A stopped bot cannot be resumed
There is no Resume on a stopped bot. To copy that trader again, create a new Trader Bot — which at least gives you a chance to revisit the settings. Paper bots stop without selling anything, because they never held anything.
Edit rules on a paused bot
You can open Settings and change rules while a bot is paused. The changes apply to copies made after you Resume; positions already open keep the rules they were opened under.