Before you follow, copy, or take advice from any trader — including me — you should know how to read a track record. Most people read them exactly backwards: they look at the biggest number first. Here’s the order that actually works.

1. Length before returns

A trader showing +80% over one year has told you almost nothing. In a strong market, a leveraged coin flip produces that. Ten thousand traders start each year; with enough participants, pure chance alone will produce some spectacular short records. You’re not seeing skill — you’re seeing survivorship.

Time is the filter luck can’t pass. A record spanning multiple market regimes — at least one crash, one boring sideways year, one euphoric bubble — is the minimum sample where process starts to separate from fortune. Ask: what has this person traded through?

2. Consistency before peaks

Two traders have the same 15% arithmetic average return over four years. One produces +12%, +18%, +14%, +16%. The other produces +90%, −40%, +60%, −50%. The average looks identical. The result is not: the first finishes roughly 75% ahead; the second finishes below where it started. That gap is volatility drag, and it’s why the peak year is the least informative number in any record — it’s usually the year the trader took the most risk and got paid for it, which tells you what they’ll do again.

Look at the worst year first. That’s the one you’ll live through as a copier, and it’s the one that predicts survival.

3. Behaviour before both

Numbers can be curated. Behaviour across time is harder to fake. Does position sizing stay steady, or balloon after wins? Did they keep posting through drawdowns, or go quiet for six months? On my public eToro profile, the performance history is there to inspect — including the years I would never choose for a marketing brochure. Read any trader’s worst quarter and watch what they did — that’s the person you’re actually copying.

4. Then, finally, the return — as a pair

A return only means something next to the risk that produced it. 12% a year with shallow drawdowns and no leverage is a better record than 25% with 60% swings — not emotionally, mathematically: as the example above shows, the second compounds far less efficiently and carries a much greater risk of ruin. Which is the next lesson.

Apply all of this to me. My record is fifteen years, public, and contains a catastrophic year that will appear repeatedly throughout this series, because it shaped every rule I use today. Judge the record by the standard above — worst year first — not by any single good stretch. If more traders were graded this way, most of what gets promoted in this industry wouldn’t survive the reading.

Educational only — my own process and opinions, not investment advice. Past performance is not an indication of future results.