Are trading bot screenshots real?

The three layers of screenshot deception

Layer one is fabrication: broker interfaces can be faked with demo accounts, browser dev tools, or image editing in minutes, and generative tools have made this effortless. Layer two is selection: a real account's best week, screenshotted, with the surrounding months omitted. Layer three is survivorship: run twenty accounts with different settings, screenshot the winner, delete the rest.

None of these require the vendor to lie about any individual image. That is what makes screenshots such durable marketing — each one can be 'real' while the impression they create is false.

• Fabrication: demo accounts and edited images, indistinguishable at a glance.
• Selection: true images of untypical moments.
• Survivorship: the winning account of many, presented as the only one.
• The tell: precision about one moment, vagueness about the sequence.

What evidence actually holds up

Continuity beats snapshots. A record published as a running sequence — every day, in order, including the flat and losing stretches — removes the selection degrees of freedom that make screenshots meaningless. If the history lives in something like a public git log, editing the past becomes visible, which is the property a screenshot can never have.

This is why our tape is the argument we lead with: not because the numbers are always flattering (a real tape's numbers routinely are not), but because the format itself is the honesty. Ask any vendor showing you a screenshot one question: where is the rest of the sequence?

First-party data — from our own desk

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