How to spot the 5% of legit traders from the 95% of scammers.

1) Scammers focus on big accounts. Legit traders focus on big returns.

This is a sad truth about people. But the vast majority would rather follow a bad trader with a big account, than a great trader with a small account. I've seen this trend for decades, and it is consistent. Someone flashes a big account value, big YOLO trades, the public eats it up. In truth these people are posting garbage trades and almost always losing money in the long run. You won't learn anything from them.

A great trader doesn't try to impress with account size, they try to impress with returns. Because with consistent compounding returns anyone can become rich from any account size very quickly. The focus on returns is how great traders are made in the first place.

2) Legit traders are fully transparent.

By fully transparent I DO NOT mean they post a picture of their account value or a profit chart. Anyone can fake such images. Full transparency means things that cannot be faked. This means real time trade entries. This means someone telling you their entire methodology in advance. This means third party verified trades.

If you know where a person immediately entered a trade, where their stop loss is, where they will take profits, and so on, then you have transparency. 95% of traders cannot and will not ever provide this, because they will quickly be revealed as frauds. If you find someone embracing full transparency to this degree, and still posting consistent returns, that is someone to follow. If you see someone bragging about returns and big wins and a big account, but they never post their entries ahead of time, you are likely dealing with a fraud.

3) Legit traders make money from trading. Scammers make money from selling you a course.

This is the most obvious, but still needs to be repeated. If someone is selling you a course, a discord, an alerts system, a newsletter, a vibecoded website subscription... they are not a winning trader. Winning traders have great compounding returns. This means they quickly become rich, and do not need to sell you some $20 alert system or course. Anyone pushing this slop is a liar and a scammer, and needs to be ignored. If someone is providing years of content completely free and has never taken a dime from their followers, that is a good sign. To be clear, I personally have never and will never sell or promote any service or course to anyone.

4) Scammers promote hype and pump and dump meme stocks. Legit traders promote a process.

The way lots of scammers make money is buying all in into some low float small-cap stock, often with a discord of dozens of followers to hype it up and pump it with them. Then they go out and promote that stock trying to pump it up and dump it. Scammers are meme stock promoters.

Legit traders are not all in. They do not hype one stock. They have a process that works. They have multiple positions and those positions all fulfill their process criteria. They aren't trying to convince you to buy into their positions. They want to teach you the process instead. If someone is trying to pressure you with FOMO to buy in, walk away.

I've got more but I'll stop here so the morons who can't read or write simple text don't accuse me of AI again.