How to evaluate any guru, service or course

After this lesson you'll have a working checklist for the trading-education industry — and you're encouraged to run it on this Academy first.

The industry you're standing in

Trading education has a structural quirk in it: the claims are hardest to verify in exactly the places where teaching sells best. Course 1 showed you how little short track records prove, and the industry's economics run on that fog. When we surveyed the offerings in one European country while building this Academy, the catalogue included subscription signal services quoting win rates with no expectancy data (School II, course 4 told you what that omission means), "free" communities funded by per-client broker kickbacks, disclaimer links that led nowhere, testimonial walls with no verifiable trades behind them, and precisely zero rigorous free curricula. Regulators in several countries have fined prominent finfluencer operations. Nearly every enforcement case traces to the same root: hidden money flows, usually from a broker paying for your trading activity.

So: the checklist. Six questions, most of them already armed by earlier courses.

1. Follow the money, all of it. Who pays this person, besides you? Broker referral fees mean they profit from your activity, whatever it costs you, which is the single most corrosive incentive in the industry. Funded-account "challenges," copy-trading cuts and per-signup kickbacks work the same way: the advice and the adviser's income point in different directions. An honest operation can answer "how do you make money?" in one comfortable sentence.

2. Performance claims: run courses 1 and 4 on them. Sample size? Regimes covered? Net of costs? Distribution behind the average? Live or backtested (course 2's four lies apply in full)? Third-party verified, or self-reported? Most claims don't survive the first two questions.

3. Win-rate-only marketing is a confession. You've known since School II why "93% wins" without loss sizes is meaningless. The darker read is that the seller knows it too, and chose the number because it can't be audited into a verdict.

4. Are losses shown, and shown promptly? Every real method has losing stretches, and School II's arithmetic guarantees it. A feed with no losses in it has been curated. A teacher who has never posted a losing period is running a highlight reel. Ask where the bad quarter is documented.

5. Does it teach a method, or a dependency? Real education transfers a skill and then ends, and this curriculum is meant to stop being necessary to you. A signal subscription renews only while you still can't trade without it, which is why the reasoning is rarely part of the package.

6. What happens when you ask a hard question? An honest operation will engage with "what's your sample size?" Plenty of others respond by banning the questioner. Of everything on this list, the response to scrutiny is the quickest one to test.

Point it at us

This Academy asks you to run the list on it, and here are the answers to hold us to. The education is free and stays free. Nobody here is paid by brokers, by referral, or by your trade count. The tools you may someday pay for compute and display things; they don't recommend. And we publish no performance claims, because we hold ourselves to the standards of courses 1 through 4 and would rather show you nothing than show you fog. If we ever break one of those sentences, this course was your warrant to leave.

Check yourself

1. Why is broker-referral funding the worst incentive on the list? (The educator earns from your activity — more trading is their revenue and your cost, and every lesson bends toward it.)
2. A service shows 14 months of gains, no losing month. Which questions kill it? (4 — no real method lacks losing stretches, so it's curation; and 2 — sample, regimes, verification.)
3. Why does real education plan for its own obsolescence? (A skill that transfers ends the relationship, while a dependency renews every month. The two business models want opposite things from you.)

The idea this lesson installs

Follow the money first; the content second.

Next: Course 6 — "Your own playbook," the school's capstone.