EA Verification · Buyer's Guide

How to Spot a Fake EA Track Record: 9 Red Flags

Most forex EA track records sold online are misleading. Some are outright fabricated. Many are curve-fit. A larger fraction are technically real but presented in a way that hides the parts that would kill the sale.

This page is the skeptic's checklist. Nine specific red flags, what they mean, and what to do if you spot one.

Red flag #1 — Screenshot-only "verification"

What it means: the seller doesn't want you to see the live data. Either the account was closed, the trades since the screenshot were bad, or the screenshot was edited. Static images are not verification.

What to demand: the live URL of the FX Blue or Myfxbook page. If they refuse, walk.

Red flag #2 — "Verified by [vendor invented]"

What it means: the seller made the badge themselves. It's marketing dressing. Real verification requires a third-party service that reads the account independently.

What to demand: the third-party service URL. FX Blue and Myfxbook are the two that matter. Anything else is unverified.

Red flag #3 — Track record starts the day the EA went on sale

What it means: the seller didn't test the strategy in private before launching. Either the strategy is brand-new (high failure risk) or the public account is the seller's first attempt at convincing anyone the strategy works (low confidence signal).

What to demand: evidence of pre-launch backtest discipline AND/OR a longer-running sister account (e.g. a V1 with more history) that the public account derives from.

Red flag #4 — Win rate above 80%

What it means: almost certainly martingale or grid. These strategies close 90%+ of trades for tiny gains, then occasionally take a single catastrophic loss that erases months of profit. The win rate is real; the strategy is broken.

What to demand: the seller's profit factor alongside the win rate. A real edge has profit factor above 1.3 with a sample over 100 trades. A martingale system has profit factor that swings wildly between cycles.

Red flag #5 — No max drawdown shown

What it means: the DD is bad enough that showing it would kill the sale. Returns are meaningless without their corresponding pain.

What to demand: the max drawdown percentage and date, alongside the return number. The ratio of return to max DD is the only metric that matters.

Red flag #6 — 30-day track record with no chop

What it means: either cherry-picked (the seller started the public account on a good month and will start a new one if it goes bad) or the strategy is too new for any drawdown event to have happened yet. Either way, you don't have enough data.

What to demand: a track record of at least 60 days with at least one visible drawdown event. The moment you know whether a strategy works is when it has a bad week and recovers.

Red flag #7 — VIP / Telegram-gated track record

What it means: if you can't verify the track record without paying, the track record doesn't exist for the purposes of pre-purchase due diligence. The seller is asking you to pay before you can see the proof.

What to demand: public verification before any payment. Walk if it's gated.

Red flag #8 — "All my customers are profitable"

What it means: at meaningful scale, testimonials should reflect realistic variance. If 100% of customers are profitable, either the seller is curating testimonials (selection bias) or fabricating them. Both are red flags.

What to look for: testimonials that mention specific drawdowns, specific bad weeks, specific reasons the customer almost quit. Real customers have nuanced experiences.

Red flag #9 — Seller blocks investor-password sharing

What it means: the seller is hiding live data. A public investor-password feed exposes the entire trading history; if they won't share it, there's a reason.

What to demand: the live FX Blue or Myfxbook URL. The investor password is public by design — the entire point is verification by anyone, without permission.

What a real public track record looks like

For contrast: here's a public FX Blue verified MT5 EA. The link below opens the live page — every trade visible, no investor password needed beyond what's already public on the feed.

Why this passes the checklist:

• Live URL, not a screenshot ✓
• Third-party (FX Blue), not vendor-invented ✓
• Both win rate AND profit factor AND max drawdown shown ✓
• Win rate 62.5% — plausible long-run number, not the 95%+ that screams martingale ✓
• Public account briefly underwater (€999.59 trough) — a real drawdown event in the history ✓
• 52 days and 242 trades is statistically meaningful sample, not a 30-day cherry-pick ✓
• V1 sister account has months of additional public history beyond V2 ✓

What you do with this

Apply the 9 red flags to every EA you consider. Every red flag is a "no." If a track record passes all 9, it's a candidate worth tracking for 30+ days before you fund anything.

You don't have to buy anything. The whole point of public verification is that you can verify on your own time, without permission, before any money changes hands.

The offer at time of writing

The EA used as the worked example is TicklesBreakout V2. The first 50 V2 lifetime licenses are free, with the catch that the user must open a VT Markets account through Tickles' affiliate link and fund $1,000+. After 50 fill, the standard price is $699 lifetime — no subscription, no monthly bill.