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. Each control below addresses one of these, and they stack.

Open positions: none, minimal, full

You choose one of three modes for the live open-positions section. Hidden shows nothing. Symbol and direction only shows that the account is long gold and short EURUSD, with no entry price, size, stop or target. Full shows everything. For a signal seller, symbol and direction is usually the right middle: it tells a visitor the account is active and what it is in, without an entry anyone could act on. Hidden is appropriate when even the direction is the product, as with a low-frequency swing service where "we went long gold today" is the whole signal.

The open-positions table also has its own column picker, separate from the history table, so even in Full mode you can drop stop loss and take profit while keeping entry price. Most sellers who choose Full regret it; start at symbol and direction and move only if 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. Visitors see a note that recent trades are delayed, which is itself a useful signal that the account is traded live.

Set the delay to at least the typical holding time. Take 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, 24 hours plus symbol-and-direction open positions plus a tight trade-table row cap is the minimum, and Hidden open positions is safer.

Trade-table columns and the row cap

In Manage you tick which columns visitors see in the trade history: symbol, direction, open and close times, lots, profit, commission, swap, stop loss, take profit, magic number, comment and so on. You also cap how many rows are listed: none, 10, 25, 50 or 100 most-recent trades. You always see everything yourself.

For a signal seller the sensible baseline is to keep symbol, direction, times, lots, profit, 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.

The row cap is underused. Capping at 25 rows lets a visitor sanity-check recent trades against the aggregate stats without handing over a downloadable history. Setting it to none hides the table entirely; the Trade statistics, By symbol and Monthly returns sections still do the proving.

Custom Analysis for visitors

"Let visitors run Custom Analysis" in Manage → 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 also a filter over the same rows the table shows, subject to the same reveal delay and column choices, so it does not leak entries the table would not. 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. The Glance hub 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 distributions if hour-of-day clustering is your edge. Think twice before hiding Execution; a scalping signal with spread and slippage hidden invites the wrong question.

Visibility is three-state. Private is yours only. Link opens for anyone with the URL but is not listed in Rankings, Explore or search. Public is listed and ranked. A signal seller who wants the record as proof for existing prospects but not as a shop window should sit on Link. There is also a "What Public Sees" preview so you can check exactly what a visitor gets before you share.

A configuration per business model

Three starting points. Adjust from here rather than from the defaults.

• Scalping EA, sold as software: open positions symbol and direction; delay 1 hour; table capped at 50 rows with stops and targets hidden; Custom Analysis on; Execution shown; Public.
• Intraday signal service: open positions symbol and direction; delay 6 or 12 hours to cover the longest typical hold; table capped at 25 rows, stops, targets and comments hidden; Custom Analysis on; Public or Link.
• Swing signal service: open positions hidden; delay 24 hours; table at 10 rows or none; Activity distributions hidden if the edge is time-based; Custom Analysis on; Link 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, and the FAQ has the current options for each setting.