For Business

Copy Trading & Signals

What a Signal Provider's Numbers Mean

A signal provider's page is a set of sums over the account's own trades: growth is balance now over balance at the start, drawdown is the deepest fall from a high to the low after it, trades is a count, profit factor is all gains over all losses, and subscribers, age and leverage are a count, a date and a setting. This paper shows the page as a label on a jar, draws growth and drawdown on one example balance line, and reads the page line by line saying how each figure is counted. After reading it you can say what each number on a provider's page was made from, and re-count it from the trades list; the paper says nothing about which numbers are good.

Difficulty
Advanced
Reading time
5 min
Pages
8
Reviewed by
Saman Rahbar

This paper is locked

Read it in the browser and keep the PDF with Premium, or buy this one paper.

Buy this paper — $3Get Premium

A provider's numbers, in five lines

The numbers on a signal provider's page are sums over the account's own trades, counted by the platform. Growth is the account now over the account at the start, less one, as a percent. Drawdown is the deepest fall from any high point to the low after it, as a percent. Trades is a count of closed trades since the page began. Profit factor is all the winning trades' gains over all the losing trades' losses. Subscribers is a count, age is when the page began, and leverage, meaning how much larger than its money the account may trade, is the account's own setting. The figures in this paper are examples, not a real provider, and none of them says what happens next.

A label on a jar

Picture a label on a jar. The label lists what is inside, counted: 12.5 percent growth, 8.3 percent drawdown, 184 trades, a profit factor of 1.55, eight months of history, all example figures. A label is honest about the past and silent about the taste. It says what went in and in what amounts, and nothing about whether you will like it. A provider's page is the same kind of thing, and this paper reads the label line by line without tasting the jar.

This paper is locked

Read next