Methodology — the One-Take Test

The test

For every signal a channel publishes, we replay what would have happened to a trade that follows one fixed rule set:

• Enter at the channel’s published entry price, with the whole position, no leverage.
• Some channels never publish a price — they say “enter at market”. There the entry is the opening price of the first minute after the message went out, read from the same candles the replay runs on. Not the minute the message landed in: that minute started before the message existed, and nobody could have traded on a signal that had not been posted yet. Where a channel does name a price, that price is used, even if the same channel usually enters at market.
• One take-profit at a +2% price move from entry (long: entry × 1.02; short: entry × 0.98). The entire position closes there.
• A fixed stop-loss, the same for every channel: 5% from entry for the Accuracy that channels are ranked by, and 10% for a second Accuracy shown on each channel’s page. The channel’s own stop is not used — see “Why fixed stops” below.
• The entry is given 10 days. If the price has not reached it within 10 days of the post, the signal is recorded as not filled within 10 days.
• Once the entry fills, the trade is followed until it reaches +2% or the stop — however long that takes — replayed against real 1-minute candles (highs and lows, not closing prices). A trade that has reached neither yet is open, and is checked again on every run.
• The candles are Binance futures, and every channel is scored on that one source. A coin Binance never listed stays without a verdict rather than being replayed somewhere else: minute highs and lows differ between exchanges, and a stop that fires on one venue can survive on another — mixing sources would make two channels’ numbers incomparable. Each verdict records the exchange it was replayed on.
• Exchange taker/maker fees are charged in the replay.

Accuracy is then: of the signals where the entry filled and the market gave an answer, the percentage that reached +2% before the stop. It is computed twice, once for each stop.

Why fixed stops of 5% and 10%

Until October 2026 the test used each channel’s own stop. That made channels incomparable: with a target of +2%, the wider the stop, the more often a trade reaches the target first — even when the direction is picked at random. A channel with a 20% stop could post a high Accuracy without ever being right about direction. With the same stop for everyone, every channel answers the same question on the same terms.

Why 5% and not tighter: crypto is volatile, and a stop of 2% is one nobody trades with — ordinary noise inside a minute would decide the result. 5% is a stop traders actually use; 10% is the view of a patient trader who gives the position room.

The possible outcomes

• Reached +2% before the stop — counts for the channel.
• Hit the stop first — counts against the channel.
• Neither yet — the trade is still open. It is not counted until it closes, and the channel’s page shows how many are open.
• Entry not reached within 10 days, price ran to the take before the entry filled, or we have no candle data — excluded from the percentage entirely. "We could not tell" is a different statement from "it lost", and mixing them would corrupt the number. An entry still inside its 10 days is waiting, and is checked again on the next run.
• On a channel that enters at market: the price had already passed the channel’s own first target by the time the entry would have filled. There was no trade to take — a fill above the first target is not an instant win, it is a signal that arrived too late to act on. Excluded from the percentage, and counted with the unfilled entries on the honesty axis.
• The take and the stop both reached inside the same minute — counted as the stop. See “The take and the stop inside one minute” below.

The take and the stop inside one minute

A 1-minute candle tells us the highest and the lowest price of that minute, not which of them came first. When one minute reaches both the +2% take and the stop — the minute the entry fills included — we count the stop. Inside a minute the order is unknown, and the doubt goes against the side that set the terms: the channel named the trade, so a minute we cannot read is not booked as its win.

This is the only place where the replay decides rather than measures, and so the only legitimate ground for disputing a single verdict. A stop that fired on Binance futures and would not have fired on another exchange is not one: every channel is replayed on the same source, and each signal’s verification page names the exchange and the minute its verdict came from.

Why one fixed take instead of the channel’s own targets

Channels publish wildly different target ladders. A channel whose first target sits 0.5% from entry "hits TP1" constantly; a channel aiming for 5% rarely does. Numbers built on the channels’ own targets are therefore incomparable between channels — and trivially gameable by placing the first target closer. One fixed +2% take, full position, and one fixed stop ask every channel the same question: when you said "go", did the market actually move 2% your way before it moved 5% against you?

Why there is no return figure for a signal channel

Until October 2026 each verified channel’s page also showed a replay that followed the channel’s own targets and stop exactly as published, with a total and an average return. It is gone from every page. What following a channel makes depends on how much of the position is closed at each target, when the stop is moved and what leverage is used — and no channel publishes that. The same calls can lose money for one follower and make it for another, so a return printed under the channel’s name would be a number about a strategy we invented, not about the channel.

Accuracy asks the one question that does not depend on any of that: did the price go where the channel said, by +2%, before a fixed stop. Copy traders are different — their results are a real account, read from the exchange, and those pages keep their returns.

Why +2% specifically

A channel places its own targets wherever it likes; the score always counts +2% from entry. The question this metric answers is not "how much could you have made" but "how often does a signal actually go the way the channel said it would, right after it was published".

That is also a real way to trade, not a synthetic benchmark. A conservative trader closes the whole position at the first take: they give up the upside of a runner, and in exchange they cut their risk sharply. The one-take number is exactly what that trader would have experienced following the channel — nothing modelled, nothing assumed about how you would have managed the rest of the position.

Minimum sample size

A hit rate shown on the listings rests on at least 10 scored verdicts. Below that we show a dash: 3 signals at 100% is an anecdote wearing a percentage.

The last 90 days beside the whole record

Every Accuracy is shown twice: over the channel’s whole history and over the signals it published in the last 90 days. The long record is never replaced — a long history is worth something — and the recent one stands next to it, so “68% all time · 41% in 90 days” tells a channel’s story in one line. The 90-day figure follows the same rules and the same 10-verdict minimum.

The leaderboard ranks on the whole history and shows the 90-day figure as a column. It has no switch to a 90-day ranking on purpose: a ranking of the last three months would take a collapse four months ago off the screen. Flags — a verified scam report among them — stand on the row whatever the window.

Signals on gold, stocks and forex

Some crypto channels also post calls on gold, single stocks, ETFs or currency pairs. We keep those signals and count them on the channel’s page, and they are in none of its numbers: Accuracy, the score, the signal count and the stop share are crypto only. Our candles are crypto, and mixing markets would make two channels’ numbers incomparable. When we add these markets, their signals will be measured the same way.

The risk profile: what the signals asked of you

The hit rate says how often a channel was right. It says nothing about how long being right took — and two channels at 75% can be completely different trades to sit in. So each verified channel’s page also carries two numbers, computed from the same replay at the 5% stop the ranked Accuracy comes from, never from a different test:

• Median wait to +2% — how long after the post the winners reached the take. Measured from publication, because that is the moment a reader had, not from the moment the entry filled.
• Median wait to the stop — how quickly the losers announced themselves.

Medians, not averages: one trade that took a month would otherwise speak for a channel whose signals usually resolve in an hour. Each appears only once at least 10 replayed signals of that kind carry the number — the same threshold the hit rate uses — and shows a dash with the reason until then.

None of this enters the channel score. It describes a channel; it does not rank one.

What this metric does not tell you

• It ignores the channel’s suggested leverage and position sizing — deliberately, because those are follower choices.
• A +2% move covers fees at moderate leverage but says nothing about whether the channel’s own suggested exits were good.
• It does not use the channel’s own stop. How often a channel publishes a stop, and how far from entry, is shown separately on its page.
• Past hit rate is not a prediction. Nothing on this page is financial advice.

Feed composition and the "Mostly promo" label

For channels we scrape, we also measure what the feed consists of: how many posts we read over the trailing 30 days, and how many of them were actual trade signals under the channel’s proven parsing mask. Both numbers are shown on the channel’s page.

• The label "Mostly promo" appears when fewer than 5% of at least 100 observed posts are trade signals — a feed where the signals are the bait and the promotion is the product.
• A typical honest signal channel publishes one signal per several posts (entries, follow-ups, recaps), which lands well above the threshold.
• Channels we cannot parse yet carry no label either way: we do not measure what we cannot verify.

Channels that publish no entries at all

A channel with no track record is not automatically a channel we have skipped. Some publish no entries in the first place — only outcomes after the fact, only commentary, or only invitations to a paid group. For those, "Unverified" alone is misleading: it suggests we have not got round to them, when in fact there is nothing on their feed that could ever be replayed.

So we count the feed. We read a large sample of the channel’s posts (at least 200) and sort every one of them into exactly one category: an entry, an outcome report, a promotion, or something else. If a single post looks like an entry — a price to enter at, with a target or a stop — the channel gets no label at all, because then it is a channel that needs a parsing mask, not a verdict.

• "Results only" — at least a quarter of the posts report how trades ended, and none open one. A feed of winners with no way to check when they were entered.
• "Commentary only" — market talk, charts and calls in prose, with no tradable entry to replay.
• "Promo funnel" — at least 40% of the posts are invitations to register, join or pay. The feed is the advert.

Stops are counted rather than labelled. Every channel page with parsed signals states how many of them publish a stop-loss — as a price or a percentage — and how many do not, in numbers and as a share. A signal without a stop has an opening and no published ending: it cannot be replayed exactly as published, and whoever scores it afterwards chooses when to stop counting. A channel that stops one trade in ten and one that never stops at all are both visible for what they are.

Channels we cannot verify — our limit, not theirs

There is a third reason a channel shows a dash, and it says nothing against the channel. Some feeds publish complete, readable entries — instrument, direction, entry, targets, stop — and we still cannot produce a record for them. When that happens the honest thing is to name our own limit rather than leave the reader guessing whether we judged the channel or simply never looked.

• "Market we do not cover" — the calls are for gold or currency pairs, and our candle history is crypto. Replaying a gold trade against a crypto-priced proxy is guesswork wearing the costume of verification: we checked one such proxy against a channel’s own gold calls and it drifted further in a night than the distance from the channel’s entry to its stop, which is enough to flip a winning trade into a losing one on paper. So we publish nothing instead.
• "Too few entries to measure" — fewer than 10 parsed entries so far. Any accuracy figure built on a handful of trades is noise with a percent sign, and it would be read as a verdict.

The channel score (0–100)

The channel score is the number the leaderboard ranks on. Since October 2026 it is built from two measurements, and nothing else:

• Accuracy at the 5% stop, 60% — the percentage above, over the channel’s whole history. It is already a 0–100 figure and is used as it is.
• Slippage, 40% — how far the price moves against the author’s entry in the first minutes after the post, on the same 1-minute candles as the replay. For each signal we read the price 1, 2 and 5 minutes after publication; a favourable move counts as zero, not as a bonus, and the signal’s figure is the mean of the three. The channel’s figure is the median over its signals, once at least 10 are measured. Limit entries — where the author waits for the price to come back to their level — are not counted: an entry the market had already left by more than 1% when the post went out. A channel that says “enter at market” names no price, so it is measured against its own first target: how much of the distance from the price at the post to that target is gone 1, 2 and 5 minutes later. With 1% or less left to the target the signal counts as 2% — the bottom of the scale — and between the full distance and that 1%, on a straight line. Without a target, it is the move from the opening price of the first minute after the post. The smaller the slippage, the higher this part. The scale: no slippage scores 100, a median of 2% or more scores 0, and everything between falls on a straight line — 2% is the whole +2% target, and a reader who paid that much to get in had nothing left to win.

Why these two are enough: Accuracy cannot be gamed by editing or deleting. Every outcome is replayed from the snapshot of the post as we first read it, deleted signals stay in the count, and edits do not move the metric. The return, risk-discipline and honesty axes used before October 2026 are gone: returns and drawdowns depend on how a follower manages the position, which a channel never states.

Honesty is still measured and shown next to the score — on the leaderboard and on each channel’s page — and is never counted in it. It is made of edits and deletions after publication (40%), entries the market never reached (25%), being a repost of another channel’s feed (20%), and how complete the calls are — symbol, direction, entry, stop, target (15%). Edits and deletions: 0 scores 100, and a channel that changed or removed 10% of the posts we re-read over the trailing 90 days is at the floor. Unfilled entries: up to 10% costs nothing, 50% scores 0.

Aggregated and automated feeds are scored the same way and ranked apart. An aggregated feed reposts signals collected from several sources; an automated feed posts the output of an indicator or a bot. Neither is the record of one trader, so neither competes with channels run by people — in the catalogue they have their own tab, and the leaderboard counts them instead of ranking them. The label is set by a person, only on what the channel says about itself — its name, its own description, the headings of its posts — and the page shows those words and the date we noted them.

What happens to a part we cannot measure

It is dropped, and its weight is redistributed across the parts that remain. It is never counted as a zero — scoring our own gaps as somebody’s failure would make the score a measure of our coverage. That is why a channel with fewer than 10 measured signals is scored on Accuracy alone.

A channel with no answered signal gets no score at all.

The owner’s trading account is shown, never added in

Some channels are run by traders who have connected an exchange account to us and published its record. Where that is the case, the channel’s page shows that account below its own results — the same percentages and the same two dates that stand on the track’s own page.

It does not enter the channel score, and it never will. The score is built from this channel’s replayed signals and from nothing else; an account and a feed are two different claims, and a trader who trades well is not thereby publishing calls that work for the people reading them. Reputation does not add up here, and nothing carries over from a person to a channel or back.

Copy traders: Verified Score and Overall Score

Verified Score (1.0–9.9) reads the daily equity curve ChainRated has archived for the account — the same archive behind the Curve record on each trader’s page — and nothing the exchange reports about its own rolling window. Three parts:

• Deepest drawdown in the archive — up to 5 points; an account that fell to zero gets none.
• Share of traded days that closed in profit — up to 3 points. Days the account did not trade are left out of the count.
• All-time return, cycles summed with profit withdrawn, capped at ±100% — from −1.9 to +1.9 points.

With fewer than 10 traded days in the archive the score is held at 5.0 or below: a handful of good days is not a record. Without a single traded day there is no score, and the page shows a dash.

Overall Score is 60% Life Score and 40% Verified Score; while a trader has no Verified Score, Overall equals Life Score.

Recalculation

When we improve parsing or fix a resolver bug, historical verdicts are recomputed under the same published rules for every channel at once. We never hand-adjust an individual channel’s numbers.