I paid for a signal group for a month so you don't have to - here are my numbers

TR

trial_and_error

Author

Original post

Disclaimer: I am not promoting anybody's signal group, which is why I am not naming the one I joined.

Hello everyone,

We have all seen the crypto signal groups by now. If you somehow have not: it is a group where one or more "experienced" traders tell you what to buy and when to sell it, normally for a monthly fee. The one I joined covered both spot and futures, with leverage up to 50x.

This particular group was advertised heavily on social media in my country and offered a three-day free trial, so I figured I would find out what was inside. Their Telegram had around 500 members. The public group was wall-to-wall winning trades and no losers, which is standard. Because of the trial I was let into the VIP room.

For context, I have been day trading for a while. I would not call myself an expert, but I do fine, so I was not walking in completely green. I skipped the spot calls because I had no interest in holding the coins they liked, and took only futures. They referred to themselves as professors and claimed years of experience and six-figure portfolios, which would be impressive if it were true. It is not.

How it works: you get a message with an entry, take profits and a stop, and you are expected to copy every one of them. We were trading on Binance. Suggested size was 5-10% of your account per trade. My first signal was SHIB, which I took at 10x and closed about 12% up. The next two were low-quality coins and both lost; we were told to close early rather than wait for the stop, so I gave back roughly 8% on each. Their stops sat around -25%.

Then came the 50x call: long BTC. I was not enthusiastic, but I had come this far, so I took it and made around 60%. Which was the high point, because that is where it stopped going well.

When the trial ran out they asked for $30 to stay. I paid, so that I could report a full month. It was bad. Mostly low-cap coins, losers arriving regularly, and only the winners ever making it into the public group. The single loss I saw them post publicly was around 2%, framed as them heroically getting everyone out in time.

My month on Binance came out as:

Total profit: 40.56 USD

Total loss: 79.10 USD

Net: -38.54 USD

So I made nothing. And that is with me skipping trades - had I taken all of them I would almost certainly be further down. Scale that to somebody using real size and it stops being funny. My losses were nearly double my winnings.

There were about 40 of us at renewal time, so they are pulling roughly $1,200 a month, and when this batch leaves another one arrives.

The point: do not join signal groups, in crypto or anywhere else. They are inexperienced traders playing a character, and the winning screenshots they wave at you were quite possibly never their trades at all.

Stay safe.

TL;DR: I lost money, exactly as expected.

Jul 30, 2026

GO

gold_question

Member

If somebody could genuinely turn things into gold, why would they be selling you the instructions?

Jul 30, 2026

SE

seen_it_before

Member

I could have saved you the month. This is a solved problem.

The people running the group get their position on before the call goes out. The members provide the buying they sell into.

Occasionally the move gets big enough that outsiders pile in and the members get to sell to them instead. That does happen. The other 99% of the time, the members are the exit.

Jul 30, 2026

NE

netsale Founder

Thanks for writing this up with actual numbers instead of a verdict. Two things
I would add from having done the same thing at a much larger scale.

First, a month is not a sample. I traded channel calls with bots for years —
tens of thousands of executed trades — and the thing that kept fooling me was
that any four weeks can look like anything. Four good weeks convinced me a
channel was good. Four bad weeks convinced me it was a scam. Both conclusions
were noise, and the only way I found out which channels were which was by
replaying everything they had ever posted, not by living through one month of
it.

Second, the biggest gap between a channel's month and your month is not
accuracy, it is entries. Across the 10,400 replayed signals that produced a
verdict, 4,093 — about 39% — never became trades at all: the price ran past the
entry band before it could fill, or never reached it. Those cost the channel
nothing and count against nothing, but they are why your list of trades and
their list of "calls" never match. You were probably filled on a different
subset than the person quoting the results.

The part of your post that would worry me most is the 50x with 5-10% of the
account per trade. That sizing decides the outcome long before the quality of
the calls gets a chance to matter. Nobody is going to say so in the VIP room,
because the fee is the same either way.

Sep 08, 2026