Income, Balanced, Aggressive: read the leaderboard through your own eyes

The same vault is a great investment for one person and a terrible one for another. A convexity bet that thrills a risk-hungry trader is exactly the thing that makes a retiree sell at the bottom. So the question a leaderboard should answer isn't "which vault is best?" — it's "best for whom?"

That's what the profile selectors on the board are for. With one click, the whole field re-ranks through one of three lenses, and a 0–100 fit score tells you how well each vault matches that kind of investor. Here's how to read them — and how to use them to build your own basket by hand.

The fit score, in one paragraph

Each profile cares about different columns, with different weights. For every vault, the board takes the metrics that profile values, ranks the vault against the field on each one, and blends those into a single score from 0 to 100. A high fit doesn't mean "good vault" in the abstract — it means "good for this kind of investor, right now, compared to everything else available." It's a ranking, not a grade carved in stone.

Income — steady, and it actually pays

The Income lens is for capital preservation: shallow drawdowns, consistent up-periods, no single whale holding the floor, and a return that beats just sitting in stablecoins. It disqualifies anything that's down on the year, deeper than ~25% drawdown, leveraged past 3×, or younger than four months. It weights low drawdown and consistency most heavily.

The trap it's built to dodge is the one I wrote a whole post about — the income illusion, where three vaults all look steady and only one actually puts money in your pocket. A flat line can mean "low risk" or it can mean "doing nothing"; the Income score is built to tell them apart.

Balanced — the best bang for the risk taken

The Balanced lens is the closest thing to a neutral "this is just a well-run vault" view. It ranks mostly by Calmar — return per unit of worst drawdown — with consistency and a smooth ride mixed in, and it only asks for a three-month track and a positive Calmar. If you don't have a strong opinion about your own risk appetite, this is the lens to start from. It rewards the vaults that earned their returns without putting you through hell to get them.

Aggressive — convexity, sized small

The Aggressive lens puts upside first and tolerates drawdown, because this kind of sleeve is meant to be sized small. It ranks by raw return with risk-adjustment mixed in — but, crucially, it still excludes the protocol vaults and the low-confidence mirages, so it surfaces real convexity rather than blowups dressed up as opportunity. The archetype is Long HYPE & Short Garbage: a bet that's supposed to be a small, high-octane corner of a portfolio, not the whole thing.

One honest caveat about the score

The fit score is relative to the field on the day you look. An 84 means "near the top of what's available right now," not "84 out of 100 forever." If the whole field of vaults gets worse, it gets easier to score well. So read fit as a ranking — who's at the top of the Income list today — rather than an absolute mark. That's a deliberate trade-off: it makes the board great at "who's best right now," which is the question you're actually asking when you're about to deposit.

Build your own basket by hand

Here's the part most people miss. The Altcopy Index is the board's default — the best-of-every-style basket — but you are not required to take it whole. The profiles turn the leaderboard into a tool for do-it-yourself selection.

Say you're income-minded. Click Income, and the board hands you the top-ranked steady vaults that are open, alive, and accepting deposits — the only ones you can actually act on. Take the top three or four, allocate to them yourself on Hyperliquid, on your own keys, and you've built a personal income basket without copying anyone's risk appetite but your own. Risk-hungry? Do the same from the Aggressive list, and size it small. Want the diversified default? Take the Index. The board is the same; the lens is yours.

This is the whole philosophy of the blog in one feature: I do the homework in the open, and you keep the custody and the final call. The profiles just make sure the homework is done through Deine eyes, not the average investor's.

Where to start

Open the leaderboard, click the profile that sounds like you, and read the top of the list. If you've followed this series from what the board is, through how the Index works und what every column means, you now have everything you need to read it like I do — and to decide, in the end, for yourself.

The final post in a series on the Hyperliquid vault leaderboard. The board itself is always live here, re-derived from public data every day.