Headline ROI is a snapshot the trader controls. Life Score is read from the daily equity curve — here is exactly what goes into it, and what a 4.5 or an 8.2 actually means.
The number a leaderboard shows you is the one it is safest to show
Every copy-trading leaderboard ranks traders by a small set of figures: ROI over some window, win rate, follower count, sometimes a current drawdown. All of them are point-in-time. They describe where an account stands today, not how it got there.
That distinction is not academic. Two accounts can show the same +120% ROI: one compounded it over three months without a single day worse than −4%, the other lost 99% of the deposit, restarted, and caught one leveraged move. The leaderboard shows you the same number for both. If you copy the second one, you are not copying a +120% trader — you are copying a trader whose method requires a fresh deposit every few weeks.
Life Score exists to separate those two accounts. It is ChainRated's own metric, computed from data the trader cannot present selectively: the daily equity curve the exchange publishes for the account.
Where the number comes from
For every copy trader we list, we pull the exchange's public daily yield curve — one data point per day, the account's return for that day — and reconstruct what actually happened to the equity.
From that series we derive:
- Reconstructed drawdown. We compound the daily returns back into an equity line and measure the deepest peak-to-trough fall inside the window. This is the drawdown the account really lived through, not the "current drawdown" figure the leaderboard reports.
- Worst single day. The largest one-day loss in the window. A −60% day is not a bad day; it is a description of position sizing.
- Daily volatility. How far daily returns scatter around their average. Steady compounding and a slot-machine curve can end at the same place; only one of them is repeatable.
- Risk-adjusted drift. Average daily return divided by that volatility. This is the ranking driver: it rewards accounts that gained without swinging, and it refuses to reward a big number that arrived as noise.
- Active days. How many days the account actually traded. This decides how much of the above we are willing to believe.
We also fold in the exchange's own account-drawdown metric and take the worse of the two readings. If the exchange says the account fell further than our reconstruction shows, we use the exchange's number.
What pushes the score up, and what pulls it down
Up: consistent positive daily drift, low volatility around it, a long record of genuinely active trading days, and no deep hole in the curve.
Down, in order of severity:
- A deep reconstructed drawdown or one catastrophic day. These do not merely subtract points — they impose a ceiling (see below).
- High daily volatility. Even profitable accounts pay for it: the same profit taken with wild swings scores below the same profit taken smoothly.
- Thin history. An account with a handful of active days does not get an elite score, however flattering its ratios look. Fewer active days pull the score toward the neutral middle, because "unproven" and "excellent" are different statements and only one of them is supported by the data.
That third rule is the one that surprises people, so it is worth being blunt about it: an inflated ratio on a nearly dormant account is a division artefact, not skill. An account that traded four days, made small gains on three of them and sat flat otherwise, will produce a spectacular risk-adjusted ratio. We deliberately discount it. Confidence in the ratio grows with active days and only reaches full weight after roughly three weeks of real trading.
The hard ceilings
Some behaviour is disqualifying regardless of how good the rest of the curve looks. Life Score applies caps that no amount of profitability can override:
| What we see in the curve | Highest possible Life Score |
|---|---|
| Worst day ≥ 50%, or drawdown ≥ 60% | 1.5 |
| Two or more observed deposit resets | 1.5 |
| Worst day ≥ 30%, or drawdown ≥ 40% | 3.5 |
| One observed deposit reset | 3.5 |
| Worst day ≥ 20%, or drawdown ≥ 25% | 6.0 |
| None of the above | 9.9 |
A deposit reset is a Fresh Start we catch in our own daily archive of the account's curve: the cycle accumulators that drift a little every trading day suddenly landing on exactly zero after a cycle with real money in it. The count starts at zero for every trader and grows only when a reset happens while we are watching — and unlike a bad month, it never rolls out of the record.
A trader who lost 55% of the account in one session cannot score above 1.5 with us, even if the following three weeks were perfect. That is intentional. The follower's exposure to that trader is defined by the worst thing the trader is willing to do, not by the average thing.
What the scale actually looks like
Scores are meaningless without their distribution, so here is ours. Across 842 copy traders with a computed Life Score at the time of writing:
- The average is 4.5, and the full range in use runs from 1.3 to 9.9.
- Seven traders — under 1% — score 8 or above.
- 103 traders score below 3.
Read a 5 as "ordinary": an account doing roughly what an unremarkable leveraged account does. Read an 8 as genuinely rare. Read anything below 3 as an account whose curve contains something the headline figures are not showing you.
If you have seen rating sites where most listings sit between 4.5 and 5 stars, this is the difference: a score built from reviews drifts upward, because everyone is somebody's favourite. A score built from an equity curve does not, because a curve cannot be enthusiastic.
A worked example
One account in our database published a leaderboard ROI of 121% with a 100% win rate. On any ranking sorted by those fields, it appears near the top.
Its daily curve, reconstructed, falls −99.88%.
Both facts are true at once. The win rate counts closed trades that ended green — a martingale that averages down and eventually closes at a small profit produces exactly that. The equity curve counts everything, including the position that did not come back. Our Life Score for that account is 1.5, set by the drawdown ceiling.
Nothing was hidden by the exchange here. The curve is public. It is simply not the number the ranking sorts on.
What Life Score does not tell you
We would rather state these limits than have you discover them:
- It reads a 30-day daily curve. The window is the public one. A blow-up from four months ago that was followed by thirty calm days will not appear in the current score. Read Life Score together with how long the account has existed and how it behaved before.
- It applies to copy traders, not to Telegram signal channels. Signal channels have no equity curve to read — they publish calls. Those we score differently: we replay every published signal against real 1-minute candles and report a hit rate. That method is documented in full on our Methodology page, and the channel ratings live under Signal Providers.
- It does not know why. The curve shows behaviour, not intent. A −40% day caused by an exchange outage and one caused by 50× leverage look identical to us, and we score both as risk. If the trader has an explanation, the place for it is their claimed profile page, not our formula.
- It is history. A trader who has never blown up has not proven that they will not. The score narrows the field; it does not remove the decision from you. Nothing here is financial advice.
Using it in practice
Open the profile, not just the list. On the trader's page, read the Life Score alongside three things: the worst single day, the reconstructed drawdown, and the number of active days behind the score. Those three lines tell you what the single number compressed.
Then size accordingly. The practical use of a Life Score is not picking the highest one — it is refusing to allocate meaningful money to a low one, however good its ROI column looks. The full ranking is at Copy Traders, and what our verification badges do and do not claim is set out in the Verification Guidelines.