From the perspective of being frequently monitored and copied, I would like to share my views. The following content is mainly on-chain, and does not include areas such as contract orders that I am not familiar with. My core point is that for most players, monitoring smart money is meaningful, but copying is unnecessary.

First, let me briefly introduce these two concepts. "Smart money" refers to traders who have a deep understanding of the market and have advantages in certain aspects, while "copy trade" is also called Copytrade, which means monitoring other people's transactions through automated programs and following the buying and selling.

In other words, smart money is actually the players who can maintain positive returns over a period of time, and the core advantages of making money in this market are actually three points: technology, cognition and information gap.

Technology, such as sniping the opening, finding the correct contract in advance through on-chain information; cognition, such as judging whether a piece of news has a positive or negative impact on the price, how high the ceiling of a narrative is, or judging the subsequent trend by analyzing the chip structure on the chain; information asymmetry, the most common of which is Cabal's inside information, or the source of information is one step ahead of most people.

Monitoring such wallets is very useful, because the market is very fast-paced and there are many projects. It is impossible to learn about each project in advance by simply relying on Twitter or Telegram. Monitoring is a very good source of information, giving you the opportunity to learn about the project in a short time after the opening, but copying is not the case.

It is not difficult to find that the technical route belongs to the winner-takes-all. A step slower will lead to much higher costs. Following orders or pumpfun insiders is basically equivalent to giving away money, because a difference of a few seconds will lead to a difference of several times in the purchase price, which becomes liquidity; and information gap can only exist in a small range. Once it is widely spread, it is no longer an information gap. Insider trading often avoids retail investors from entering the market through new wallets, violent washes, etc. These two are destined to be advantages that belong to only a very small number of people. It is more suitable for ordinary players to improve their cognition, and the simple and crude imitation method of following orders just lacks this core point. You just buy and sell blindly, but you don’t know the reason at all.

Another natural disadvantage of copying is that you buy more expensive than others and sell cheaper than others. In addition, there are a lot of smart wallets that copy orders. Although I have not done this, as a wallet that has been copied since the NFT era, I am also very disgusted with copying orders, because a large number of non-spontaneous buy orders in a short period of time can easily destroy the original price trend and bring subsequent selling pressure, which is not conducive to the normal development of tokens. So I actually understand the behavior of copying orders. The reason I did not do this is just because some group friends are also copying my wallet.

Furthermore, most profitable players on the chain focus on odds rather than winning rates, often making small losses and big profits, maintaining market sensitivity through daily operations, and striking hard when encountering truly promising opportunities. However, whether the copy wallet can withstand previous losses and whether it dares to follow orders under pressure is a difficult problem. Copying is the laziest transaction. Choosing to copy is equivalent to handing over the ownership of the wallet to others. As the saying goes, don't be someone else's Adou, be your own Zhao Yun.