Top Traders Report - August '26#
Introduction#
August was a month of two halves for the major crypto perps. For the first eighteen days all four benchmarks drifted within a few percent of flat, with $HYPE the only name showing relative strength as it worked its way to roughly +15% by August 18 while $BTC and $ETH sat near zero. Then the tape turned vertical. Between August 19 and August 21 every major repriced sharply higher, and the move kept extending into the last week of the month. $HYPE led the group, at one point above +60%, and closed August up about +53.7%. $SOL finished around +39.6% after peaking near +50% on August 27. $ETH gained roughly +29.5% and $BTC about +23.4%, with both majors giving back a few points in the final days.
The environment rewarded two things: patience with long exposure through a flat tape, and the willingness to size up and hold once the breakout arrived.
This month Mirrorly’s top 3 traders are:
🏆 Shadow Wallaby (Hyperliquid): +$4.55M
🥈 Crystal Tasmanian (Hyperliquid): +$1.45M
🥉 cat hot wallet (CL) (Hyperliquid): +$983K
Shadow Wallaby led August with $4.55M in profit across 27 closed positions, executing 17.2k trades inside them, the heaviest intra-position scaling of the group by a wide margin. This is his second month in a row at the top of the leaderboard and his fifth appearance in the last six monthly reports. He won 70.4% of positions with an average win of $401.6K against an average loss of $384.5K, so the hit rate rather than the payoff ratio carried the month, producing a profit factor of 2.48. His average profit-to-drawdown ratio of 0.51 was the lowest in the table: his positions sat through drawdowns roughly twice the size of the profits they eventually booked. The holding periods are inverted relative to the usual pattern, with winners held about 2 days 13 hours and losers held nearly five times longer at 12 days 12 hours.
Crystal Tasmanian finished second with $1.45M across 27 closed positions and 288 trades, returning to the top three for the third time this year after May and June. He combined a 59.3% win rate with an average win of $125.8K against an average loss of $51.5K, a payoff ratio of about 2.4 that produced a profit factor of 3.56 and an average profit-to-drawdown ratio of 3.78. He was also the fastest trader of the three, holding winners for about 20 hours and cutting losers in under 6 hours on average.
cat hot wallet (CL), featured for the second time after April, generated $983K across 18 closed positions and 411 trades. He ran the lowest win rate of the three at 38.9%, but his average win of $173.0K came to roughly 8.3 times his average loss of $20.8K, giving him the best profit factor of the group at 5.30 and the strongest risk-adjusted numbers in the table, with an average profit-to-drawdown ratio of 10.04. Winners were held about 2 days on average and losers under 10 hours, the same let-winners-run, cut-losers-fast profile he showed in April.
Trader Spotlight: Shadow Wallaby#
Notional Exposure and PnL#
Shadow Wallaby ran a long/short book all month, and the shape of that book explains his PnL path. Through the first twelve days his long notional cycled between roughly +$20M and +$38M against a short book of about -$8M to -$10M, keeping net exposure firmly positive at +$20M to +$30M. From August 13 he rotated: the long book collapsed to near zero while shorts deepened to -$28M, and then to about -$40M on August 18 and 19, taking net exposure to roughly -$25M exactly as the majors began to move.
His cumulative PnL shows the cost. He entered August with about +$1M accrued on carried positions, drifted lower to roughly +$500K by mid-month as the flat tape offered little, and then fell to about -$700K around August 19 and 20 as the short book was squeezed by the rally. He flipped back long within a day, pushed net exposure to +$40M at its peak on August 23, and the curve responded: cumulative PnL jumped to about +$2.5M by August 22, reached roughly +$4M on August 24 and 25, plateaued near $3.8M as he ran a small net short into the late-August pullback, and finished at +$4.55M after a final step higher on August 31.
Positions PnL by Symbol#
Shadow Wallaby traded seven symbols: $BTC, $ETH, $HYPE, $JTO, $LIT, $PUMP, and $ZEC. He stacked repeated $ETH longs through the month, including a large winner carried from late July and another opened on August 22, while his $BTC activity was dominated by shorts that closed red between August 5 and August 19.
Total PnL by Symbol#
$ETH led at about +$3.4M, followed by $ZEC at roughly +$2.2M, a single long held from August 21 to 25. Together the two contributed about $5.6M, well above his entire monthly result. Smaller positives came from $LIT (+$281K), $PUMP (+$109K), and $HYPE (+$88K). On the losing side, $BTC cost about -$832K, almost entirely from shorts into the August 19 rally, and $JTO about -$712K from the carried long. The two losing symbols absorbed roughly 25% of his gross gains.
PnL Distribution#
Shadow Wallaby's distribution shows a heavy tail on both sides. His median closed position was +$86.4K, with 19 of 27 positions finishing green. The 25 positions inside the P1 to P99 range (+$1.99M and -$778K) produced +$3.12M, while the two outside it added +$1.44M, driven by his top winner near +$2.2M. What sets him apart from the other two traders is the size of his losing tail: three positions closed between roughly -$700K and -$780K, and a further four lost between $125K and $290K. His winning tail was larger still, with four positions above +$850K, and that asymmetry at the extremes is what turned a 70% win rate into a $4.55M month despite average wins and losses of similar size.
Trader Spotlight: Crystal Tasmanian#
Notional Exposure and PnL#
Crystal Tasmanian sat out most of the quiet first half. Through August 17 his exposure rarely exceeded +$1M, and his cumulative PnL stayed basically flat. He began building longs on August 18 at around +$3M, stepped up to +$5M to +$7M on August 20 and 21, and then scaled aggressively after the breakout: long notional reached +$8M to +$12M from August 23 and touched +$15M in short bursts on August 25 and 27. The only short exposure of the month was a brief -$3M to -$5M flicker on August 22, closed within hours.
His PnL curve is a single step. Cumulative PnL moved from about +$150K on August 20 to roughly +$1.5M by August 22, as the $BTC long he had opened on August 18 was closed into the rally. From there he added modestly, peaking near +$1.75M on August 25, before a series of smaller losses in the final week pulled the total back to +$1.45M at month end. The small drawdowns before and after the main step are consistent with his 3.78 profit-to-drawdown ratio.
Positions PnL by Symbol#
Crystal Tasmanian traded only five symbols: $BTC, $CASHCAT, $HYPE, $SOL, and $ZEC. His month was defined by one $BTC long held from August 18 to 22, his largest winner by far, followed by a cluster of shorter $BTC positions between August 23 and 28 with mixed outcomes. Early-August $HYPE longs closed green, while his two biggest losers were a $HYPE long on August 27 and a $CASHCAT long opened on August 30 and closed at month end.
Total PnL by Symbol#
$BTC led at about +$1.2M, roughly 83% of his monthly total on its own, followed by $ZEC at +$418K from a long opened on August 21 as the privacy token joined the rally, and $SOL at +$52K. His two losing symbols were $CASHCAT (-$96K) and $HYPE (-$91K), where the late-month long more than offset the early-August winners. Combined losses of about $187K against roughly $1.63M in gross gains left him profitable on three of five symbols.
PnL Distribution#
His median closed position was +$8.1K, with 16 of 27 positions finishing green, and most of the book clustered between -$40K and +$60K. The 25 positions inside the P1 to P99 range (+$856K and -$126K) produced +$496K, while the two outside it added +$951K, about 66% of his monthly total, dominated by the $BTC long near +$1.08M. His losing tail was contained: the four largest losses fell between roughly -$80K and -$125K, so his top winner ran close to 9 times his worst loss. The month was made by one position sized and timed for the breakout.
Trader Spotlight: cat hot wallet (CL)#
Notional Exposure and PnL#
CL followed a long-only profile for almost the entire month, with a single brief short on August 22. His exposure came in discrete blocks. He held about +$1.4M of long notional from August 1 to 10, went flat for a week, and then deployed +$5.5M to +$7M across August 18 and 19, followed by a smaller +$2M block into August 20. After the brief short he ran small longs of $0.5M to $2M between August 23 and 25, a final +$5M to +$6M block on August 26, and was flat for the last five days of the month.
His PnL curve is two steps. Cumulative PnL moved from zero to about +$440K on August 10 when the first block closed, held there through the flat week with a small dip to around +$400K on August 18, and then jumped to roughly +$1.05M on August 19 as the second block was closed into the rally. A further push to about +$1.1M on August 20 marked the high, and a run of small losses in the final ten days took the total back to +$983K.
Positions PnL by Symbol#
CL traded eight symbols: $AAVE, $AERO, $BTC, $ETH, $NEAR, $PUMP, $ZEC, and $ZRO. Three longs defined the month: a $PUMP position held from July 31 to August 10 and paired $ETH and $BTC longs from August 18 to 19. Everything after August 22 was a cluster of short-lived alt longs, mostly red, with $ZRO the only meaningful winner among them.
Total PnL by Symbol#
$PUMP led at about +$440K, followed by $ETH at +$310K and $BTC at +$231K. The three together contributed roughly $981K, essentially his entire monthly result, with $ZRO (+$68K) and $AERO (+$9K) adding a little more. On the losing side, $ZEC cost about -$48K across two attempts, $NEAR -$18K, and $AAVE -$9K, for combined losses of roughly $75K against about $1.06M in gross gains. He finished profitable on five of eight symbols.
PnL Distribution#
CL's median closed position was negative at -$10.0K, with 11 of 18 positions finishing red, but every loss fell between roughly -$5K and -$54K. The 16 positions inside the P1 to P99 range (+$427K and -$54K) produced +$601K, while the two outside it added +$382K. His three largest winners, at roughly +$440K, +$361K, and +$262K, each exceeded his worst loss by a factor of five or more, and together they were worth about 108% of his net monthly PnL. This is the same structure he showed in April: a larger count of small, quickly cut losses paid for by a few winners left to develop.
Case Study - Three Longs and a Macro Catalyst: Inside CL's August#
CL's spotlight showed a month decided by three positions. The chart below places them on the price of each token. A $PUMP long ran through the first ten days of August, well before the market moved, while the $ETH and $BTC longs were opened on August 18 and closed on August 19, right at the start of the rally that defined the month. Around them sit the small red markers of positions he cut within hours.
As per the $PUMP long, CL bought about 556M $PUMP on July 31 at 16:00 UTC at an average of $0.002093, and added another 111M seven hours later at $0.002068, for roughly 667M tokens and $1.39M of notional at an average entry of $0.002089. The setup was likely driven by the token's own fundamentals: $PUMP had absorbed a mid-July unlock without breaking down, and cumulative buybacks had passed $414M with roughly $400K to $500K per day flowing into them. From his entry the token rallied about 32% over the ten days he held it, and roughly 140% by late August when it traded near $0.005. The position went about -$34K underwater within hours of entry and then trended in his favor for ten days. Open profit peaked at roughly +$520K on the morning of August 10, and he sold the entire position at 10:00 UTC that day at an average of $0.002749, booking +$440K, a gain of about 32% on notional.
The $ETH and $BTC longs: two attempts, one catalyst. On August 17 at 23:30 UTC CL bought 1,500 $ETH at about $1,914 and 50 $BTC at about $64,456, roughly $6.1M of notional across the two. Both moved against him overnight and he cut them within three hours, taking -$21K on $ETH and -$22K on $BTC. Nine hours later, at 11:15 UTC on August 18, he re-entered both at almost identical prices, 1,500 $ETH at $1,905 and 50 $BTC at $64,343. This time he held through a small drawdown of about -$12K and -$9K respectively, and on the morning of August 19 he added 400 $ETH and 10 $BTC, taking the pair to about $7.5M of notional.
The add came a little over an hour before the catalyst. Around 12:30 UTC on August 19, the US Treasury unexpectedly announced it would double the size of its long-end bond buyback operations, from $2B to at least $4B per operation, starting in September. Yields fell, the dollar weakened, gold rose about 3%, and crypto followed: $BTC was up more than 6% and above $68K within four hours. CL closed both positions at 16:30 UTC, selling 1,900 $ETH at an average of $2,098 for +$361K and 60 $BTC at $68,726 for +$262K. The combined result of +$622K came from a gain of about 10% on $ETH and 7% on $BTC, and open profit at his exit was within a few percent of its peak. Three minutes before those fills he posted "b tier liquidation run in crypto" on X.
Both majors kept running after his exit: $BTC reached $72K the next day and $78K by August 22, while $ETH passed $2,300 and then $2,500. CL re-entered a 30 $BTC long that evening near $69.9K and sold it the next morning near $71.9K for another +$61K, but he did not chase further. On August 21 he wrote on X: "sold a bunch of stuff half way into this pump, am a infamous early tp'er but still nice to see, because it felt like ppl genuinely offboarded, but this btc move shows theres always lot of money, just chilling on the internet, esp on what looks like a probable htf bottom." Earlier in the month, in a reply on August 3, he had put the same principle more bluntly: "if ur day trading and something moves 10% just take profit lol you already won the dice roll".
Conclusion#
August's two-speed tape produced three different routes to the top of the leaderboard. Shadow Wallaby was net short into the August 19 breakout, absorbed a drawdown that took his cumulative PnL below -$700K, and then flipped long with size to finish first at +$4.55M, with $ETH and $ZEC contributing $5.6M between them. Crystal Tasmanian waited out the flat first half with almost no exposure, then converted one $BTC long sized into the rally into 83% of his +$1.45M. CL earned +$983K from three positions, one built patiently before the move and two placed a day ahead of the macro catalyst that triggered it.
The case study shows the flip side of a low win rate. CL lost on 11 of 18 positions and still posted the best profit factor and profit-to-drawdown ratio in the table, because the losses were small and fast while the winners were sized and held until the move arrived. For copy traders, the question is not whether a trader is right often, but what each wrong call costs and how much each right one is allowed to pay.
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cat hot wallet (CL): https://x.com/CL207
