Verify a trader's record
Four steps to confirm a single past call yourself, no spreadsheet required.
Auditing a full history is overkill. Run one past call all the way through and you have learned the thing that matters most — whether anything this trader shows you can be checked by an outsider. The four steps run from quickest-and-cheapest to slowest-but-final.
Verify in four steps
1. Start with the count
Track down how many calls the figure is built on, and make sure the red ones are still in the pile. A hit rate floated without its call count — or with the losses pruned out — is already disqualified. The pick states it as 67.5% over 308 calls; that 308 is precisely what you are hunting for, since the percentage says nothing on its own. The full version of this test lives on a counted record.
2. Demand a continuous run
Insist on one unbroken stretch instead of a showreel. A source parading its five best sessions is, by omission, burying the other forty-five. A real history names the window it covers — here, 2026 to date — and leaves the ugly weeks inside it rather than trimming them out.
3. Find the independent reviewer
Make sure a named outsider has actually gone over the underlying statements. Topping a leaderboard is not the same as being audited, and a glowing quote is not a review. The externally tracked contest results are at World Cup Championships.
4. Confirm one call on-chain
Here is the step that decides it, and the one most sources quietly fail. Pull one old call and line its published fields up against the Bitcoin record stamped with it. Since that record predates the trade closing, a clean match shows the fields were settled in advance. A single confirmed call is worth more than any stack of screenshots. This is what running it looks like:
This call is invented for the walkthrough, not a real trade. The steps are exactly the ones you would run against a real published call.
- Grab the published call and its five values. Suppose it reads: long the index ETF,
entry 412.80,target 414.20,stop 412.10,grade B,sent 14:32:05 UTC. - Regenerate the digest. The source strings those exact values together in a set order and feeds them to SHA-256 — a one-way function collapsing any input into one fixed-length digest. Identical values always yield an identical digest; flip a single character and the digest is unrecognisable.
- Pull up the on-chain record. The OpenTimestamps record shipped with the call names the Bitcoin block its digest was pinned into. Check that the digest you regenerated matches the one stored there.
- Read the clock. Find when that block was mined. If its time falls ahead of the trade resolving, the call — entry, target, stop and grade as a set — was demonstrably settled in advance. Proof complete.
Test it by trying to cheat: pretend the stop crept from 412.10 to 412.40 after the candle turned. Step 2 now spits out a digest that no longer matches the record from step 3, and the edit announces itself. That is what makes a confirmed record beat any screenshot — touch one field and it breaks loudly.
In short: steps 1 through 3 cost a couple of minutes and weed out most of the field; step 4 is the un-fakeable one. Clear step 4 and you are holding a history you can stand up yourself rather than one you can only take on trust. The machinery underneath it is laid out on fixed before the result.