Our live account is currently in a multi-week drawdown, and every trade of it is publicly visible on MyFXBook. Industry logic says this is marketing suicide. We think the industry logic is exactly backwards, and the reasoning is worth spelling out.
The industry default: curated reality
The standard EA marketing playbook: show the backtest equity curve, screenshot the best months, reset or hide accounts that draw down, and when a system finally breaks, relaunch under a new name. This works because buyers reward it: smooth curves sell. The result is a marketplace where the least honest presentation wins the click, and buyers learn the hard way that the smooth curve was survivorship theater.
Why we publish everything anyway
Reason one: losing months are the product specification. A buyer who purchases a 57% win rate breakout system is purchasing the losing months. They are not a defect. They are a documented, backtested, statistically scheduled component of how the returns get generated. Hiding them is like selling a car while hiding the fuel consumption.
Reason two: it pre-filters for the right customers. A buyer who sees May at -2.54% and June running red, and still signs up for early access, is a buyer with calibrated expectations. They will not panic-email during the next normal drawdown, will not turn the system off at the bottom, and will not feel deceived. Transparency selects for customers who succeed with the product, and customers who succeed with the product become the long-term business.
Reason three: it is the only defensible position long term. Every hidden drawdown is a liability waiting for a screenshot. A public verified account has no such debt. When your marketing and your broker statement are the same document, the entire category of getting caught ceases to exist.
What this asks of you as a buyer
Radical transparency only disciplines the market if buyers use it. So use it, on us first: open the track record, find the losing months, check the drawdown, compare live win rate to the claimed backtest. Then demand the same from every other seller you evaluate. The sellers who cannot show you a verified account with visible losing months are telling you something. Believe them.
The numbers behind the counterintuitive conversion claim
The claim that drawdown posts convert better than winning posts deserves its receipts. Comparing the site's behavior across the spring: the February and March posts (published during the +10.34% and +5.60% months) drew steady traffic with modest signup conversion. The May and June drawdown posts drew comparable traffic but converted to early-access signups at a visibly higher rate, and the signup notes field (optional free text) filled with variations of one sentiment: finally someone showing the losing side. The mechanism is not mysterious. Every visitor to an EA site arrives pre-loaded with skepticism from a market that has burned them before; winning months feed the skepticism (everyone shows winning months) while published losses starve it. In a market where the default is curation, transparency is not just ethics. It is differentiation that compounds, because it is the one marketing asset competitors cannot copy without also adopting the honesty that produces it.
Where the transparency policy has hard edges
Full disclosure has boundaries worth stating, because unlimited transparency is its own kind of dishonesty about how edges survive. We publish: every closed trade via the broker-verified MyFXBook feed, monthly results in perpetuity, the complete statistical profile of both systems, and honest commentary during drawdowns. We do not publish: the exact entry and exit rules, the parameter values, or the code, because an edge broadcast in full detail invites the crowding that erodes it, which would defraud the buyers who paid for its scarcity. The line is drawn at verifiability versus replicability: everything needed to verify the systems perform as claimed is public; everything needed to replicate them without purchasing is not. Buyers occasionally push on this line, and the answer stays the same: the track record proves the engine works, the purchase buys the engine, and the engine's continued exclusivity is part of what every buyer is paying to protect.