Evaluating a verification service

By Otto Research 3 min read Article 71 of 95

A verified record is one that a third party publishes from a direct connection to the broker. That third party is a service with its own design and its own incentives, and the strength of the verification depends on both.

What the connection must be

Read-only. The service should connect through an investor password or a broker data feed that permits reading trades and balances and nothing else. It should never hold a password that can trade. If the service can place or close trades, or if the account owner can supply the data instead of the broker, the record is not verified; it is hosted.

What the service must show

The account type, demo or live, prominently. Equity as well as balance, so that floating losses are visible. Every trade, with its open and close time, price, volume, stop loss and take profit, and its commission and swap. Deposits and withdrawals, dated. The start date of tracking and any gap in it. The broker and the leverage. And it should not allow the owner to hide any of these, or to remove the record and start again without that being visible.

What the service must not do

Accept uploaded statements or backtests as if they were tracked records. Allow the owner to delete losing trades or periods. Present a balance-only growth figure as the headline while burying equity. Rank accounts by return without the drawdown alongside. And it must be clear about its own connections: a service owned by an EA vendor, or by a broker, has a conflict, and the record is trustworthy only if the read-only connection and the full display make the conflict irrelevant.

Worked example

Service A connects by investor password, tracks equity every few minutes, shows every trade with its stop, lists deposits, flags demo accounts in red, and does not accept uploads. Service B accepts a monthly statement uploaded by the owner, shows a balance curve, and displays a "verified" badge once the owner's identity has been confirmed. Both call themselves verification. Only the first verifies trading.

What this means when an EA is trading

When an EA's record is described as verified, look up the service and apply this page. If the connection is read-only and everything is displayed, the record is evidence and the questions on the previous page apply. If not, treat the record as a screenshot with a badge. Where the service and the EA vendor are connected, the disclosure should be on both sites, and the design of the service, not the disclosure, is what makes the record usable.

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