How to spot a fake strategy provider on cTrader Copy platform

Jan 16, 2025

If you'd like to watch this article as a video, click here.

First of all, you have to look at the overall return percentages.

Quite often, at the top of the rankings, you are going to have some providers which have like thousands or even millions percentage returns in their accounts. If that's the case, you have to look at the history, because most often what they do is they take a small account, let's say 10 euros deposit, and they are multiplying this account twice in each trade. So it means they bet all of their capital on one trade, so that 10 euro becomes 20, 20 becomes 40, 40 becomes 80, and so on. So they do a few of such trades in the beginning and of course that doesn't mean that they know how to trade. They can open many accounts and put 10 euro each and one of them will succeed in this, and you will have something like 10 euros became 500 euros and this will be already a few thousand percentage return. And then they just trade this account further with smaller risk and that's how it grows sometimes even into millions of percentages. But this is not a real return and this is not genuine. So you shouldn't really be trusting such people. Because if they're trying to tweak the system, if they're using shady marketing tactics, it means that they probably have their agenda and this agenda is not to benefit you.

Example of initial "doubling" technique. You need 64 accounts if you want to double one account every cycle, for 6 cycles without knowing how to trade at all. 63 accounts will burn, but one will survive and that's the one they'll publish on cTrader Copy. So they spent $640 for this initial "warm up" and got a $428 final account (minus transaction costs). Net cost: -$212. And now they have $180K invested. At 10% a month and 30% performance fee, that's $5400 per month. Conclusion: initial warm up is worthwhile, however, it blinds people from reality and attracts "get rich quick" type of investors.

The other thing that you can look at is the equity curve itself.

The equity curve has to be smooth. It can have some drawdown periods, but just look at many providers and you will see that some of them have very weird equity curves, like very sharp declines, or like electric shocks - many quick declines.

Warning: smooth equity curve, but ROI is 33000%+ in only 4 months which tells us that something is hidden here

Then we take a look at equity curve and we see a 46% intraday drop, which means that this trader is trading without stop losses and with very high lot size compared to his account size (leverage). Conclusion: this trader will eventually fail, do not invest.

Another bad example: "electrical" shocks. Would you like to have your equity electro-cutted to almost 0 intra day? ROI curve shows positive returns (somehow!) but equity/balance curve reveals that this account, although very popular, is actually going nowhere. Also, due to cTrader Copy peculiarities and possibility of investors having lower leverage accounts, it's likely that many investors blew their accounts during sharp equity drop days, although the provider account survived.

This account had many investors and went from 6671% ROI to -100% (account blow up). Things always look nice before a crash happens, and it usually happens suddenly.

Not perfect, but a decent ROI & equity curve. The best example out of all in this article. Ironically, this provider has no investors at all. The algorithm and the collective mind of the masses do not favour the good traders. Masses want to get rich quick, while the brokers want blown accounts. Where do the serious traders and serious investors meet? On copy platforms it happens very rarely...

And it means that they're using some tactics which are not really suitable for long term. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to inflate their trading results so that they can accumulate a lot of investors and so that they can earn a bit of performance fees. This "a bit" can actually be a lot, but it's only for a short while. They can hide their losing trades by trading without stop and just leaving them open for a long time. You can do a small test - just add some of those weird providers into your favorites and then come back later a month or a few months or half a year, a year later. And you will see that they just go down 99.9% equity at some point in the future after collecting performance fees from you.

So you are left with nothing. The brokers earned money and the strategy provider also earned money without risking much of their own capital. What was the biggest fool in this game? It was you. So look at the equity curve. It has to look like a regular equity curve.

Here are my tips for spotting fake strategy providers and just understand that most of the strategy providers will be fake on any platform, not just cTrader copy, but also other copy platforms. The reason why those copy platforms were created is to attract more traders for the broker, to generate more liquidity, in other words. The goal of those platforms is not to help you make money. So you are kind of going against the current and if you wanted to benefit from it, you have to find people like myself who go against the current and who actually trade the professional side of the Forex market, but who make themselves available for the general public. And this is very rare.

So you can't really just go to the platform and just select anyone randomly. Because this is just pure gambling. You have to know the person. You have to understand how they trade. You have to perhaps have a call with them. And just make sure that you can really trust that person. There is very few people on the entire earth that you can find who would fit into these rules. But i'm one of them. I have a free public signals channel (update: not anymore) where you can see my daily trading actions. I have a verified track record available for you to see. And also, I am available on cTrader Copy to be copied (update: not offered by my current broker, but I still do private account management).

Make your own conclusions. Have a nice day.