Anti-copy privacy settings for signal sellers: prove the record without leaking the trades

Two things you are protecting

Anti-copy privacy settings for signal sellers solve a specific tension. You need the public to trust your record, which means showing real, unedited data. You also sell access to the trades, which means the public must not be able to reconstruct them for free from the page. A record that leaks its entries is a free signal with a paywall painted on it.

There are two different leaks. The obvious one is open positions: symbol, direction, entry and size, shown live. The subtle one is closed trades shown too quickly. A strategy that holds for hours tells a watcher its next move through its last exit, and a reader who can see a closed trade within a minute of the close can shadow a slow strategy almost perfectly. The controls below each narrow one of these, and they stack.

Open trades: off, or on with only the columns you choose

The Open trades section is a switch, then a column picker. Switched off, open positions are hidden from the page for everyone, you included — the data still syncs and still counts in equity, it is just not shown; that is the right choice when the direction itself is the product, as with a low-frequency swing service where "we went long gold today" is the whole signal. Switched on, you decide column by column what a visitor gets: Date, Type, Symbol, Lot, Open price, Stop loss, Take profit, Floating P/L, Swap, Deal type, Magic number and Comment. Stop loss and take profit are off unless you turn them on. You also choose separately whether Market orders and Pending orders are shown.

For most signal sellers the useful middle is on, with only Type and Symbol kept: a visitor can see the account is active, long gold and short EURUSD, with no entry price, size, stop or target that anyone could act on. Showing everything is a legitimate choice for a seller whose edge is not in the entry, and the settings are there so you can go as open as your business allows. Most who start wide narrow later; it costs nothing to start narrow and widen only when a specific buyer objection justifies it.

The reveal delay

Individual closed trades can be withheld from visitors for 1, 6, 12 or 24 hours after they close. The delay is measured from when the platform received the trade, not from the broker's timestamp, so terminal clock settings cannot shorten it. Totals never wait: gain, drawdown, Score and the month calendar update the moment a trade syncs. Until the delay has passed, a recent trade is simply not listed — and not exported. There is no switch that hides closed trades altogether: they are part of every public record, so the delay is the whole of this dial.

Set the delay to at least the typical holding time. A scalping trading bot with an average hold of 12 minutes and 95% of trades closed inside an hour leaks nothing through a 1-hour delay, because by the time a visitor sees an exit the next trade is long done. A swing service with a 2-day average hold leaks heavily even at 24 hours, because a visitor seeing yesterday's exit can infer today's position is probably still open or just reversed. For that service the minimum is a 24-hour delay, Open trades narrowed to Type and Symbol, and stops and targets hidden from the trade table; switching Open trades off is safer.

Trade-table columns, page size and CSV export

Every public record shows its closed trades with eight core columns that cannot be switched off: Open time, Symbol, Direction, Lot, Open price, Close time, Close price and Profit — the minimum that proves a trade happened and what it made. Under Public Page Settings → Trade records you choose which of the rest visitors also see — Stop loss, Take profit, Pips, Commission, Swap, Deal type, Magic number and Comment — and how many rows the public table lists per page: 5, 10, 25 or 50. That is a page size, not a cap on depth: a visitor can page back through the whole record, and the verified totals always include every trade. The reveal delay is what holds fresh trades back. Your own dashboard view has its own settings and is not affected by any of this.

For a signal seller the sensible baseline, on top of the core columns, is to keep Commission and Swap and drop Stop loss and Take profit. Stops and targets are the parameters of your method; a reader with entry price, stop and target for a hundred trades can reverse-engineer a rules-based system. Dropping Comment matters if your Expert Advisor writes anything meaningful there. Magic number is a judgment call: it helps buyers verify the per-EA breakdown, and reveals nothing about the logic on its own. In a portfolio, an optional column shows only if every account in it shows that column.

There is a separate switch for CSV export. On, a visitor can download the closed trades they can see, with the reveal delay already applied; off, the page is read-only: a visitor can page through the history, or filter it with Custom Analysis if you have left that on, but not download it. Neither the page size nor the export changes what the Advanced statistics, By symbol and Monthly returns sections prove, so a seller who wants the table as a sanity check rather than a data source can keep it short and switch the export off, and the record still verifies. Equally, a seller with nothing to protect in the entries can leave the export on and let buyers take the whole record into a spreadsheet — the option exists for exactly that reason.

Custom Analysis for visitors

"Let visitors run Custom Analysis" under Public Page Settings → Trade records is on by default and lets a visitor filter your trades by date, instrument, strategy, direction, weekday, hour, lot size, profit, duration and comment text, with every statistic recomputed. It is read-only and never touches your settings.

The trade-off is real. Custom Analysis is the single feature that makes a careful buyer trust you, because it lets them remove your best month or best symbol and see what is left. It is a filter over the same rows the table shows, with the same reveal delay, and it never displays a column you have hidden — but its filters run over every field, so a visitor can still filter by comment text even when the Comment column is hidden, and the Lot column is always shown. If your comments or your sizing carry the method, the column picker will not keep them private. Sellers sometimes switch it off reflexively. Unless your concern is specifically the hour-of-day and weekday filters revealing a session-based edge, leave it on. A buyer who cannot test the record assumes it fails the test.

Sections and visibility

Every analytics section below the pinned top can be hidden or reordered, and the order applies publicly. Account stats at the top cannot be hidden, and that is the feature, not a limitation: the verified totals, drawdown and month calendar are always public, so the badge means something. Hide Activity & timing if hour-of-day clustering is your edge. Think twice before hiding Execution quality; a scalping signal with spread and slippage hidden invites the wrong question.

Visibility is a Public switch plus two share doors. Public is listed and ranked. Share by Link opens for anyone holding the coded link, no sign-in, with a view of its own. Share by Invitation opens for the members you name, once they sign in, with a view of its own. Whichever door a visitor uses, the trade records and the full breakdown need a free account; the headline stats and growth chart are open to all. A signal seller can keep the public view lean, give a prospect a fuller view by link or by invitation, and reset the link the moment a deal is off. Each view has a preview so you can check exactly what that door shows before you share.

A configuration per business model

Three starting points, from most open to most private. None of them is a rule. Every control here is a dial between protecting the trades and opening the record up, and the settings exist so you can choose either — or anything between — for your own business. Adjust from here rather than from the defaults.

• Scalping EA, sold as software: Open trades on with Type and Symbol only; delay 1 hour; stops and targets hidden from the table; CSV export on or off as you prefer, since a 12-minute hold is not copyable an hour later; Custom Analysis on; Execution quality shown; Public.
• Intraday signal service: Open trades on with Type and Symbol only; delay 6 or 12 hours to cover the longest typical hold; stops, targets and comments hidden; CSV export off; Custom Analysis on; Public or Unlisted.
• Swing signal service: Open trades off; delay 24 hours; page size 10 and CSV export off; only the core columns; Activity & timing hidden if the edge is time-based; Custom Analysis on; Unlisted until the record is long enough to rank.

What these settings cannot do

None of this stops a determined subscriber from leaking your signal; that is a contract problem, not a page setting. And none of it lets you hide a bad result, because the totals are always public and the worst drawdown ever reached is recorded permanently. What the settings do is let you publish a record a buyer can verify from a free account while keeping the part you sell behind the service. Sharing your results covers the wider set of publishing controls.