BlogBasics
How to Trade Memecoins on Solana
A beginner path for meme coin trading on Solana. Set up a wallet, choose a bot, decide who to follow, and put risk rules in place before your first trade.
By @ceosvex5 min read
Meme coin trading on Solana is simple to start and hard to do well. You can make your first trade in ten minutes, and lose the money about as fast.
This guide is the slower path: wallet, bot, who to follow, and risk rules, in that order.
Choosing who to follow comes before choosing a tool
- Decide whoWallets to copy and devs to snipe. This is where a wallet finder such as Hood Hunt sits.
- ExecuteYour own bot or terminal: Axiom, GMGN, Trojan, Padre, Bloom or Blizz.
- ReviewYour own log. Keep what paid after costs, cut the rest.
What you are getting into
A memecoin has no product behind it. Its price is attention. Attention arrives fast and leaves faster.
New tokens launch on Sol all day. Most go nowhere. A few run hard. The people who profit most are usually the ones who were in first, and some of them launched the token.
So as a beginner you are late by default. The job is to be less late, and to keep losses small while you learn.
Step 1: Set up a trading wallet
- Create a new Solana wallet just for trading. Keep it apart from any wallet holding money you care about.
- Write the seed phrase on paper. Never type it into a website, a chat or a form. Nobody legitimate will ask for it.
- Fund it with SOL. Only what you can lose completely. Think of it as a course fee you might not get back.
Some trading tools create a trading wallet for you on first use. GMGN's docs say its Solana Telegram bot does this, for example. The same rule applies: only send it what you are ready to lose, and read how the platform handles keys.
Step 2: Choose a bot or terminal
You can swap by hand through any Solana exchange app, but memecoin traders mostly use dedicated tools because they are faster and have the controls you need.
There are three ways to use them:
- Manual. You find a token, you click buy and sell.
- Copy trading. The tool buys when a wallet you chose buys.
- Sniping. The tool buys the moment a dev you chose launches a token.
Tools that Hood Hunt users trade with include Axiom, GMGN, Trojan, Padre, Bloom and Blizz. We compare them in Best Meme Coin Trading Platforms.
Pick one and learn its settings.
Step 3: Understand what a trade costs
Each trade has more costs than the number on the button.
- Platform fee. Often around 1% per trade. GMGN's docs, for example, state a 1% fee per transaction.
- Priority fee and tip. Extra you pay so the network handles your transaction fast. The same GMGN docs describe both.
- Slippage. The price moves while your order lands, more so in small pools.
You pay all of it buying and again selling. So a token has to rise by several percent before you break even. Small trades get hit hardest, because priority fees and tips do not shrink with your size.
Step 4: Decide who to follow
This is the step that decides your results, and beginners tend to skip it.
You have three options.
Follow the noise. Group chats, trending tabs, social posts. By the time a token reaches you this way, early buyers are looking for someone to sell to.
Follow wallets. Find traders who win often and copy or track them. This works when the wallet is still profitable for someone buying after it. Many are not: their own profit looks great, and a copy of it loses to delay and fees. Read Solana Copy Trading: Who to Copy Matters More Than Which Bot before you add a single address.
In 10 of these 12 Copy wallets, the copy wins less often than the wallet
| Wallet | Own win rate | Copies closed in profit | Copy, average per token |
|---|---|---|---|
| FdBB…pzxZ | 78% | 60% | +50% |
| HZtb…SB72 | 52% | 72% | +125% |
| 5m1G…kW7a | 79% | 51% | +47% |
| 7Pgq…urSg | 68% | 65% | +133% |
| 2dV2…C2Vb | 79% | 56% | +25% |
| Gmjv…LXyK | 72% | 67% | +30% |
| HzeF…kRq7 | 62% | 68% | +88% |
| CrKw…Y7fD | 79% | 61% | +71% |
| HhYG…gKR3 | 65% | 60% | +150% |
| 824R…Vd6A | 76% | 59% | +20% |
| 2N3F…Poi5 | 58% | 50% | +52% |
| BDUV…cbKG | 52% | 50% | +50% |
Follow devs. Some devs launch token after token that reaches a real market cap. Others launch and dump in a minute. If you can tell them apart, you can snipe the good ones at launch. See How to Snipe Dev Wallets on Solana.
8 of 259,205 devs pass all 4 default checks
| Check | Devs left |
|---|---|
| All devs | 259,205 |
| 3+ launches | 32,175 |
| Reach $20K in half of their launches | 411 |
| First-second cap under $10K | 171 |
| Clean to $20K, drawdown 50% at most | 8 |
Where Hood Hunt fits
Hood Hunt is built for step 4. It gives you profitable Sol wallets to copy and devs worth sniping. It is not a bot. It does not trade and it never connects to your wallet. You take what it shows you to the tool from step 2.
- Wallets. Every wallet gets a verdict: Copy, Watch, Check or Skip. It comes from a copy test: what you would have earned buying one second after that wallet, after fees, tips and entry delay.
- Devs. Which devs keep launching tokens that reach your target market cap, how clean the launches are, and how fast the dev sells. Every launch shows bots and bundles.
- Fresh. The last 30 days, rebuilt every hour.
For a beginner the verdicts matter most. They stop you copying a wallet because its profit number is big.
One week is 1.5 SOL. See pricing.
Step 5: Set risk rules before the first trade
Write these down. Follow them when you least want to.
- Fixed size. The same small amount on every trade. No doubling after a loss.
- Daily stop. A loss limit for the day. Hit it, close the app.
- Exit plan at entry. Set take profit and stop loss when you buy, not later.
- Take some off. When a trade runs, sell part. A paper gain on a memecoin is not money yet.
- Limits on automation. If you copy or snipe, set a max spend per token and per day.
- Keep a log. Entry, exit, result after costs, and why you took it.
Common beginner mistakes
- Ignoring who holds the supply. If the dev and a bundle hold most of it, you are their exit.
- Copying the top wallet on a leaderboard. Ranked by its profit, not by yours.
Your first week
- Days 1 and 2: set up the wallet and one tool. Make two tiny manual trades to learn the buttons and see the real costs.
- Days 3 and 4: choose a handful of wallets or devs to follow. Track them without trading.
- Days 5 to 7: trade or copy at minimum size with limits on. Log everything.
- End of week: read the log. Keep what paid after costs. Cut the rest.
The short version
Trading memecoins on Solana comes down to four things: a separate wallet, one tool you know well, a good answer to "who do I follow", and rules that cap your losses. The tool is the easy part. Spend your effort on who you follow and on staying small.
Past results are not a promise of future ones. Memecoins are high risk, and you can lose everything you put in.