And I suppose for my second post in 18 years we'll discuss geometry. Over the years I've seen many fintwit influencers and their following (I was one) promoting the idea that all that matters at the end of the day is overall PNL on spend vs payouts. True...unless you want to identify if you have any genuine skill... Most here understand props. Most understand trading. What few have understood because they haven't been shown aside from a couple folks in the industry is what explains the big pnl screenshots. This is a distillation of content @MAGNUS_FUTURES and JJ Simon (youtube.com/@itsjjsimon) have put out. Give them a follow. An eval is a bet with fixed odds. You can calculate them before you place a trade. The math and example here is premised off @VestExchange one step $25k, no discount code... $375 (no DLL, 80% split) $2500 to pass $1500 drawdown Assume the trader has zero edge. Pure coin flip. Assumptions: - trader risks full $1500 every trade - trader uses 75 point stops (for fee calcs) - trader withdraws everything after every win If you're a coin clip, the odds you pass are a distance: $1500 / ($1500 + $2500) = 37.5% Entry model doesn't change the math. Fees drag it to 36.5% What is the account worth? Risk the whole $1500 to make gross of $1500. Half the time you win, pull $1200 after the profit split, go again. Half the time it's gone. Run taht forward and the average account gives you one payout before it dies. So a funded account is worth its drawdown times the split. 1500 x 80% = $1200. Fees take it to $1165 Since you pass 36.5% of the time, an account is worth $425 before you even buy it. It costs $375. So you make $49 per account knowing nothing about the market. 13% return on a coin flip, after fees. Yes it's a pricing mismatch, yes most props have it, and yes they know (because most traders aren't buying 100+ accounts) $49 per account is average. Averages only show up if the action is repeated enough times. A single account pays nothing 82% of the time. 3 accounts: 55% chance you get zero payouts and lose the whole spend. 850 accounts: 0.0%. You'd need 153 failures in a row which doesn't happen. At 850 accounts you're looking at roughly +$42k expected and a 90% chance of finishing green. Not because you can trade. Because you bought enough accounts that the average shows up in the bottom line. This is why the screenshots of big payouts exist. Influencers (most, not 1, 3 or 10 in particular; I'm speaking generally about the long-time influencers in the space) running hundreds (thousands?) of accounts is going to produce a big number at some point. It's arithmetic. Statistically, 697 of those 850 accounts return nothing and it doesn't matter, because the 153 that pay cover all of them (and when luck favors them, a few of those accounts could catch big runs at just the right time to inflate more). Then the big number becomes the content. And what gets sold is the entry mode, the risk management, and the system. The thing that produced the result, owning 850 accounts, is never the product or what's taught. Something worth thinking on At that scale you can't tell if the person can trade. The spread from luck alone is about $33k either way , and a small real edge is worth $15k across the whole portfolio. The luck is bigger than the skill. To be clear, 95% band bracket where there is no statistical difference from a coin flip sits between a loss of $21,150 and a gain of $109,650. Anywhere in that bracket is ordinary luck. Clearing it takes an edge above +.046R per trade (expectation of $118,602 across the portfolio). Under that, 850 accounts cannot separate a skilled trader from a coin flip. The results of influencers, especially with the obfuscation of underlying metrics like account quantity, spend, and yoloing accounts before hitting a payment can't and doesn't prove skill. Again credit to Magnus and JJ for bringing light to the math behind this. I think most influencers are unintentionally following this math, but in a much more disorganized way. I think most genuinely believe the edge is in the chart and their approach. The math doesn't give a shit. The bankroll is the strategy at this level of the game.

I had been in Lanto’s Discord from early 2023 until earlier this year. I defended him from naysayers in the group and on X, distilled his content into guides early on, and built the chatbot that new members used. This weekend’s fiasco confirmed conclusively what OGs had been flagging for some time. Fintwit prop firm influencers are “successful” through survivorship bias and volume, not edge. Buy enough independent attempts and pure luck eventually produces large winners, even when the underlying approach has little or no positive expected value once net on the portfolio is established. Those big runs are the ones that the public gets to see. The average guy in the audience is running 2, 4, maybe 5 accounts on average while paying discord fees to "learn how to trade" Recent public examples among many in the fintwit affiliate and influencer space: @dhesi_trades - 170+ accounts @thebrianstonk - 240+ accounts @lanto_trades - 819+ accounts 5-6 in eval or S2F fees on just one firm. Eventually something hits. The run gets screenshotted and turned into content that's used for the next 10 months of promotions for the group, or pushed in promo videos encouraging use of an affiliate code. The costs typically don't see the light of day. Screenshots get cropped (usually), account numbers are hidden, the actual PNL on the machine is kept private. The machine: 1. subscription fees, course sales, and affiliate commissions fund more accounts 2. more accounts make a big winner close to inevitable 3. the big runs, sell more subscriptions, courses, and garner more aff code use Repeat. The prop firm space is inherently dirty, relies on ponzinomics, and is unfixable; it's by design. But the affiliate and furu space - that props implicitly encourage - is dirtier. Fresh cash from courses, subs, and affiliate payouts keeps the account volume flowing so the occasional big payouts can be marketed as a skill taught to their followers. The trading can lose money, but the machine still wins, because the audience pays for step 2 of the machine. Now look at what's sold. Courses, discord subs, mentorships, and an implied promise to teach a skill to escape the rat race. Learn this IFVG. Take this unicorn. Manage your risk. Trade the system. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and use code DUMB. The average member can't play the volume game and nobody tells them that is in fact their mentor's game. I left for three reasons: the quality of members in the group declined after the TPT run-up and subsequent repeat promotions leveraging that run, OGs who asked questions were treated poorly, and some kept raising exactly the disclosure issues that surfaced this weekend. Buy enough attempts. Hide or minimize the cost. Market the winners as skill. Accept money from people who cannot realistically replicate the process. You can pick whatever word or phrase you want for this machine that is pervasive in this "industry." Mine is "fraud."