How to read a trader's track record before you copy them

Win rate is the most misleading number on the page

A 90% win rate sounds like skill and is trivially manufacturable: hold losers until they recover, close winners quickly, and the ratio looks excellent right up until the position that does not come back.

The mirror case is equally misleading in the other direction. A trend strategy can be right 35% of the time and highly profitable, because the winners are several times the size of the losers.

Win rate only means something next to the average win and average loss. On its own it tells you about a trader's exit discipline, not their profitability.

Drawdown tells you what you would have had to sit through

Maximum drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough fall in the account. It is the number that determines whether you would actually have stayed subscribed, which matters more than the final return — most people who lose money copying a profitable trader do so by leaving during the drawdown and missing the recovery.

Read it against the return. A 40% gain with a 10% maximum drawdown is a very different proposition from a 40% gain with a 35% drawdown, even though the headline figure is identical.

And ask when the drawdown happened. A deep one early in a long record is a different signal from one that is still open.

Sample size, and what a short record cannot tell you

Thirty trades is not evidence. A strategy with a genuine edge and one with a lucky month are indistinguishable over a short record, and this is a mathematical limit rather than a matter of scrutiny.

Time matters as much as trade count. A record that has not lived through a rate decision, a sharp reversal or a low-liquidity holiday period has not been tested against the conditions that break strategies.

This cuts against new traders unfairly, and it is still true. The honest reading of a two-month record is 'not yet knowable', not 'promising'.

• Under ~100 trades: treat any conclusion as provisional.
• Under ~6 months: the record has not seen a full range of conditions.
• A record with no losing month is a warning, not a recommendation.

Specific patterns that should stop you

Some shapes in a track record are reliable signals of a strategy that will eventually fail badly, and they are visible without any special analysis.

• A smooth equity curve with a small number of large losses — the shape of martingale or grid recovery, which works until it does not.
• Position sizes that increase after losses rather than staying proportional to the account.
• Long-held losing positions alongside quickly-closed winners, which is the mechanism behind an implausibly high win rate.
• Returns that depend on one or two enormous trades — remove them and see whether anything is left.
• A record that starts precisely at a market bottom, which usually means the earlier part is not being shown.

What to check on the platform itself

Independent of any individual trader, verify where the numbers come from. A track record assembled from broker execution data is a different kind of claim from one a trader typed in, and the two are frequently displayed identically.

Check whether the displayed figures update on their own, whether the platform distinguishes real accounts from demonstration ones, and whether closed positions are visible individually rather than only as a summary. If you can see individual trades with times and prices, the record is checkable. If you cannot, you are trusting a summary.

Common questions

What is a good win rate for copy trading?

There isn't one in isolation. A 35% win rate with large winners can outperform a 90% win rate with one catastrophic loss. Read win rate together with average win versus average loss.

How much track record is enough before copying someone?

As a rough floor, around 100 trades and six months — enough to have traded through varied conditions. Shorter records are not necessarily bad, they are simply not yet informative.

What maximum drawdown is acceptable?

Whatever you would actually sit through without unsubscribing. That is a personal number, and the honest test is to imagine the drawdown already having happened to your balance.