Hi CookTim,
Thank you for your thread - its definitely got me thinking. I have recently noticed that there are some high-profit/growth signals on here for which I have downloaded the trading history.
I have can see in their trading history that they have a very high percentage of profitable trades (>90%) and extremely high profit. When one inspects their trading history it is evident that they have placed many trades of the same type, size, etc in rapid succession and closed them out again in rapid succession. Obviously one would ask the questions why it is necessary to open multiple positions of the same type rather than just open a single, larger position (?).
Something that I am struggling to understand is that even though many of the trades are "copies" of each other, the fact remains that a substantial proportion of the "unique trades" are profitable. Does this mean that the signal provider is opening many, many accounts and basically guessing trades, then gradually trimming down the list of accounts to those which made good statistics, then presenting it as a signal on here?
I thought that MQL5.com would only display the signal history for the signal during the time its been live as a broadcast signal on MQL5. So a scammer cannot develop a system offline until they have one that has a nice history, then broadcast their signal on MQL5.com with that history that was "recorded offline" (?). This means that even if the signal is repeating many trades then even though many of those trades are copies of themselves, they were broadcast legitimately (i.e. they were posted live on MQL5 without already knowing what the outcome of the trade would be), and to me this would mean that the only advantage of posting multiple copies of the same trades is to make the trade history of the signal look longer than it really is.
As an example, check out the this signal here:
https://www.mql5.com/en/signals/118879
The signal has an outrageous profitable trade percentage and pips earned vs lost. The signal is also reported as having 1047 completed trades. Inspection of the history log file shows that those trades are actually executed in batches of 3-8 trades that are of the same currency symbol, so really there are approximately maybe 150-200 unique trades. The thing is that 90% of those trades must still be profitable (because the rest are just copies) and so either the signal provider is unusually skilled at placing trades, in which case I cannot understand why they would want to sell their system for $20, or it means that they are somehow able to post results retrospectively after the outcome of the trade is known, and I dont think MQL5's platform allows someone to do that.
Id be interested to hear your thoughts. I am not claiming that they are definitely scammers, and I am not claiming that they definitely arent - their results certainly seem too good to be true but surely the MQL5 administrators would know that a signal provider is "up to something" if they have multiple accounts waiting to filter it down to the one that gives good results?
Apologies if my post doesnt make sense!
Kind regards,
Paul
