After seeing someone start following
@LRothery_Trader’s service recently, and then reading through some of the comments and Lee’s replies, I thought I’d add my opinion because this is exactly why I bang on about transparent, reproducible results.
I don’t think Lee makes up his results.
I think there’s a much more important problem with them.
They’re his results.
And when you’re charging people to follow a tipping/trading service, the important question isn’t whether you achieved the published P&L. It’s whether your subscribers had any realistic opportunity to achieve something comparable.
I followed Lee for a month some time ago because the reported returns caught my attention. What concerned me wasn’t whether he personally achieved them. It was whether a paying subscriber could reasonably replicate them.
In my experience, the answer was no.
A significant proportion of the reported P&L came from in-play trading at prices specific to his own execution. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that if you’re publishing a personal trading diary.
The bigger issue for a paying subscriber is whether those trades were realistically followable in the first place.
In my experience, there was often little or no warning that a trade might be coming. Selections would appear sporadically amongst other posts and, unless you were effectively glued to your screen waiting for an alert, you could easily miss a large proportion of them.
That matters because missing even a handful of the right trades can completely change your P&L.
If a significant chunk of the headline profit comes from fast-moving in-play selections that many subscribers are unlikely to enter at the same price (or enter at all) then the published result becomes increasingly difficult to use as a meaningful representation of subscriber performance.
Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with trading this way.
The issue is selling access to it using your own personal P&L as the headline measure of success.
There were also set-and-forget selections where results were recorded using advised/obtained prices rather than BSP.
During the month I followed, I saw examples where the difference was enormous. A winner being recorded at around 15.0 when it eventually went off around 4.0, resulting in roughly +14pts being reported. On another occasion, a lay was recorded around 3.5 before drifting substantially and eventually winning, meaning the reported loss was dramatically smaller than someone entering later could have experienced.
Lee’s position appears to be that everyone will get different prices and should therefore track their own results.
That is precisely the problem.
If you’re selling access on the strength of a published P&L, there needs to be some realistic and independently verifiable benchmark against which subscribers can judge the service.
Otherwise, the headline number tells them very little about what they could actually have achieved.
This is why Fortis tracks every selection to BSP.
I don’t always like what the numbers say. Sometimes BSP makes the results look considerably worse than prices I personally obtained.
But that’s the point.
They’re independently verifiable, broadly reproducible and not dependent on me telling you what price I happened to get.
If you’re considering paying for any tipping or trading service, don’t just ask:
“How much profit has the tipster made?”
Ask:
“Could I realistically have made it too?”
Those are two very different questions.