Cohort Alpha Lens: Tracking Smart Money Bias and Exposure

Compare cohorts side by side to see who is leaning long or short, where their size concentrates, and which coins are becoming crowded.

This workflow is for users who want to analyze the market through the lens of trader groups and use that information to make better decisions. Instead of looking at a single wallet or a single metric, you compare cohorts side by side to answer three questions fast:

1. Who is performing best and worst right now? Start by scanning cohorts by perp PnL to separate consistent winners from consistent losers. Winners often signal higher-quality flow. Losers often signal crowded, late positioning that can unwind.

2. What is each cohort currently leaning into? Next, track cohort bias and exposure to see whether winners are building long exposure in a coin, or whether losing cohorts are piling into the same direction.

3. Where is the risk concentrated? Finally, drill down into positions and liquidation-risk by asset to see whether a cohort’s exposure is stable or sitting close to liquidation pressure. When a heavily exposed cohort is also fragile, the market becomes more sensitive to sharp moves and cascades.

Used together, these calls let you produce a simple, tradeable output for any interval: top coins crowded by winners, top coins crowded by losers, the direction each cohort leans, and which coins are most at risk of forced unwind.

Necessary Rest API:

• Get Cohorts (get all cohort definitions and the criteria used to classify wallets — the foundation for every cohort-based comparison)

• Get Cohort Bias (get the 12-hour long/short bias trend for each cohort in 2-hour intervals — the primary signal for which groups are leaning where and whether that's shifting)

• Get Cohort Summary (get a snapshot for a specific cohort including top assets by activity, full exposure metrics, and 24h trader count changes — surfaces who is winning and where they're concentrated)

• Get Liquidation Risk by Asset (get each asset's percentage of open interest at high liquidation risk within a cohort — identifies where a cohort's exposure is fragile)

• Get Positions Heatmap (get a cross-market overview of open positions by coin and cohort including long/short split and bias — the single fastest way to compare all cohorts simultaneously across all coins)

Necessary HL Info Endpoints:

• meta (get the entire list of tradeable perp assets)

• activeAssetData (get real time wallet data for a specfiic asset)

Optional Rest API:

• Get Cohort Bias (Download File) (download 24-hour bias time-series data grouped by segment — ready to chart directional tilt over longer windows)

• Get Cohort Metrics (Download File) (download per-coin cohort metrics including position count, value, and bias over time — enables multi-coin, multi-cohort comparison in a single file)

• Get Position Breakdown by Cohort (Download File) (download cohort-level position breakdown for a specific coin with value close to liquidation and 24h comparison — drill into any coin to see which cohorts hold it and how vulnerable they are)

• Get Position Metrics by Coin and Segment (get time-series position metrics for a specific coin scoped to a single cohort — track whether a segment is building or reducing exposure in a coin over time)

• Get PERP PnL Leaderboard (rank wallets by perp PnL to identify which wallets are driving the performance of a given cohort — useful for grounding cohort-level signals in specific high-conviction actors)

Optional Info Endpoints:

• clearinghouseState (get an overview of the user's perp trading stats)

• openOrders (show the current open orders for an account)

An example of how a self-made dashboard using the Cohort Alpha Lens would look like: