Guides and reference · Are whales usually right?
Guide 08 of 212 min read
Are whales usually right?
How often the whales on Hyperliquid were right about the price, misses and base rate included, with numbers from every daily close.
Good for: a post that says whales are long, so the price will rise, before you repeat it.
Say a post reads “whales are loading longs on BTC” and suggests the price has to follow. How often has that been true? WhaleRadar keeps a scorecard: every daily close where whales leaned one way, and every whale move, judged by what the price did next.
Whales are often wrong. Here is how often.
In the 30 daily closes to 2 Nov 2026, the price moved the way whales leaned by the next close on 56% of the market days that moved: 533 times with the lean and 414 times against it, across 71 markets. The price rose on 43% of the same days.
After whales opened or added a position of $1M or more, the price moved their way by the first daily close at least 24 hours later 50% of the time (1,362 of 2,735 moves that moved). After a cut or a close, it moved against the side the whale left 51% of the time.
What counts as right
A lean is the Whale Tide of one market at the daily close: long from 53, short up to 47, split in between, which makes no call. It is right when the price moved its way by more than 0.1% by the next close, wrong when it moved the other way by more, and flat in between. A whale move is judged at the first daily close at least 24 hours after it. A cut or a close is right when the price then moved against the side the whale left.
Read it against the base rate
When a market rises on most days, a lean that was always long looks right most of the time. So the scorecard shows how often the price rose over the same closes. A lean says something only where it beats that number.
Why large money is wrong so often
A position on Hyperliquid can hedge one held on another exchange, which the chain cannot see. A whale can be early and right a month later, while the scorecard judges the next day. Some positions are sized to sit through a move, not to time it. None of this says what a whale meant, only what the price did next.
What the scorecard won’t show
It won’t show whether a whale made money, which depends on its entry, its exit and its size. The PnL leaderboard shows that. A share of right calls is a record of the past, not a forecast.