What a stock-alert service's track record proves

How it works

A stock-alert service, a picks newsletter or a paid trading room sells a stream of calls: buy this ticker, around this price, sell at that one. The record it advertises is built from the same calls, and the question that decides what the record is worth is where its prices come from.

There are two possible sources. One is fills: what an account actually paid and received, with a broker's records behind it. The other is market prices at the moment of each call, with an entry and an exit taken from public data and the profit calculated as if somebody had traded exactly there. The second needs no account at all, and nothing in the record tells you which one you are looking at unless the seller says so.

The clearest primary-source description of the second kind is the Federal Trade Commission's complaint against WealthPress, filed on 12 January 2023 in the Middle District of Florida. These are the FTC's allegations; the company settled, and the FTC sent refunds in April 2024. Subscribers, the complaint says, saw a members' page with a "tracker" of past recommended trades and a calculated net profit from taking all of them (¶63):

none of the trades depicted in the trackers was actually made by WealthPress or its purported experts. Instead, they represent paper trading of a fictional portfolio that never actually exposes Defendants to the market. The entry and exit prices in the trackers are ostensibly taken from publicly available pricing data, and the profits or losses depicted are purely hypothetical.

Two further allegations show how such a record grows. Some trackers included "supposed trades that pre-date the first trade the service recommended to subscribers", which the complaint calls "wholly fabricated" (¶64). And in the sales videos, the defendants "searched historical price information for significant price changes, and then pretended that their service had predicted those changes before they happened" (¶32).

The gap that matters to a subscriber is the one between that arithmetic and an account. By the FTC's account, WealthPress's own surveys found purchasers' results "typically varied—often substantially—from those documented in Defendants' trackers" (¶53). Its records showed that consumers "would have lost money overall" following one service, PrimeTime (¶55). For another, Blitz Alerts, "despite a tracker purporting to show overall profits", substantial numbers of subscribers "and even their own purported experts" could not realise the tracker's profits (¶56).

A record computed from prices is not fraud in itself; a seller can label it and compute it honestly. What it cannot be is evidence that anyone earned it.

Five choices that make a record look better

None of the following requires inventing a trade. Each is a decision about what to count, and each one moves the headline number.

The first four come from the SEC Division of Examinations' Risk Alert of 17 April 2024, which describes what examiners found in the advertising of registered investment advisers. It is not about alert services, and by its own words it "has no legal force or effect". It is useful here because it names the techniques precisely.

1. Which calls are in it. Examiners saw advertisements that "included only the most profitable investments or specifically excluded certain investments", such as those "written off as a loss or were lower-performing".
2. Only what was closed. Advertisements "that included the performance of only realized investment information in the total net return figure and excluded unrealized investments". In an alert service this is the call with no stop that is never closed, and so never counts as a loss.
3. The window. Advertisements that "did not disclose the time period", and performance shown for "time periods when most investors would have experienced the advertised performance returns because of general market performance". A long-only picks record from a rising year mostly measures the year.
4. A record that is not the accounts. A "performance track record with securities that were not purchased by the advisers in a similar manner in their clients' accounts". The record and what anyone holds are two different things.
5. The arithmetic. This one is ours, not the SEC's. Three calls returning +25%, −20% and +20% add up to +25%. Followed with one stake carried from call to call, they compound to +20% (1.25 × 0.80 × 1.20 = 1.20). A record that sums percentages, sizes every call differently, or quotes returns on the option premium rather than the account can tell a reader very little about what an account would have done. The yearly figure that compounding gives is a CAGR, and the worst fall along the way is the maximum drawdown.

There is a sixth gap that no choice creates: the subscriber trades later than the alert. In the WealthPress complaint, the email or text alert often did not contain the trade, and subscribers had to log in to the members' page to see it (¶65). The record uses the price at the alert; your fill comes after you read it, and in a thinly traded stock the other subscribers reading the same alert are trading at the same moment. That difference is slippage, and a record built from prices never shows it.

The yardstick a registered adviser is held to

A seller of impersonal alerts is usually outside the rules below, for the reasons set out in when trading software has to register as an adviser. The rules are still the most useful checklist available, because each was written against one of the choices above. A seller who cannot meet them is telling you something, even if nothing obliges them to.

The SEC Marketing Rule (17 CFR 275.206(4)-1) binds registered investment advisers. An advertisement may not "include or exclude performance results, or present performance time periods, in a manner that is not fair and balanced" ((a)(6)). Gross performance must come with net performance, after "all fees and expenses that a client or investor has paid or would have paid" ((d)(1)). Results must be shown "for one-, five-, and ten-year periods, each presented with equal prominence" ((d)(2)), so the adviser does not pick the window. A slice of a portfolio must come with "the performance results of the total portfolio from which the performance was extracted" ((d)(5)). And the rule names the kind of record a price-built tracker is: hypothetical performance, "performance results that were not actually achieved by any portfolio of the investment adviser", including backtests and model portfolios.

In the UK, COBS 4.6.2R requires an authorised firm showing past performance to make it "not the most prominent feature of the communication", to cover "the preceding five years" in "complete 12-month periods", to state the reference period and source, to disclose the effect of charges where figures are gross, and to carry "a prominent warning that the figures refer to the past and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results".

The FTC route is the one that reached the seller of stock-trade alerts described above. The WealthPress settlement "prohibits them from making any claims about earnings without having written evidence to back those claims up", according to the FTC's April 2024 release. That order binds those defendants. The principle it applies, that an earnings claim needs evidence behind it, is a fair question to put to any seller: what is the written evidence for this number?

Who trades against the alert

A record can be honest and the service still costly, when the author's own trading depends on subscribers acting on the call. Each case below is described as the regulator or court described it, with its status.

• Steven M. Gallagher. On 19 September 2025 a jury in the Southern District of New York found him "liable for securities fraud and manipulative trading" in an SEC civil case. Between December 2019 and October 2021, according to the SEC's statement, he urged Twitter followers to buy stocks "in which Gallagher had already amassed holdings", then "sold those stocks while he continued to recommend others buy them, never disclosing that he was selling", for profits of over $2.6 million.
• Andrew Left and Citron Capital. The SEC's complaint of July 2024 (LR-26056) alleges that "Left bought back stock immediately after telling his readers to sell, and he sold stock immediately after telling his readers to buy", and that Citron Research was presented as independent and uncompensated while the defendants had "compensation arrangements with hedge funds". In the parallel criminal case, a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted Left on 1 June 2026 of one count of a securities fraud scheme and 12 counts of securities fraud, according to the Justice Department, which put the profits at more than $21 million.
• Brett Rosen and RB Capital Partners. The SEC's complaint, filed on 21 January 2026 (LR-26475), alleges that from at least January 2021 to June 2024 they promoted Solar Integrated Roofing on social media as "an attractive, long-term investment" while "making massive, undisclosed sales of their own Solar stock". A complaint is an allegation, not a finding.

The common thread is non-disclosure: holding or trading against a position while presenting the call as advice. Disclosure is not the same as safety, though. A draft of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee, dated 22 November 2024, says regulators have difficulty where a promoter "simply discloses security holdings in a company and easily profits off of their followers predictable trading behavior", and that in such cases "there is arguably no fraud". The same draft notes that section 17(b) of the Securities Act makes it unlawful to promote a security "without fully disclosing the receipt and amount of consideration received or to be received". A line in a service's terms saying the authors "may hold positions" is a disclosure, not an answer.

What each kind of proof shows

Only the last row connects a call to a result, and only from the day you start. That is the one link no seller-supplied document can establish: that the call reached you, with a time on it, before the price moved.

What it costs

The subscription is the visible price. In the WealthPress complaint the trade-recommendation services were "typically priced between $1,000 and $2,500" (¶62), and memberships could auto-renew into a recurring subscription that "can cost as much or more than $1,000 per year" (¶68). The FTC's refund release describes the charge as "hundreds or even thousands of dollars", and the refunds went to 19,857 consumers.

The larger cost is the one the tracker hides: the difference between the record and your fills, multiplied by the money you put behind each call. A service whose own records show it lost money, as the FTC alleged of PrimeTime, costs its subscription plus its losses.

What you can do about it

Ask for the full alert log before paying. Every call as it was sent, with a timestamp, including the losers and the calls still open. Then ask two questions in writing: is the published record actual or hypothetical, and if actual, whose account is it? A seller who will not answer the second is telling you it is the first.

Recompute it yourself. One fixed stake per call, compounded from call to call, exiting at the stop or the target as published, with your own commission taken off. Count an open call at today's price, not as a pending win. Then compare your figure with the advertised one. A spreadsheet is enough; the point is that you chose the rules.

Pick the window yourself. One, five and ten years, or since the first call, is what a registered adviser has to show. Ask for those periods rather than the stretch the seller chose.

Ask about the authors' own trading. Do they hold the stocks they call, may they buy before an alert or sell after one, and does any issuer or third party pay them? Ask for the policy in writing.

Look the seller up, and read the result as a fact, not a verdict. FINRA's registration check starts with asking "Who are you registered or licensed with and in what capacity?", then searching BrokerCheck or the SEC's IAPD database. In the UK, use the FCA Firm Checker, and use only the contact details it lists; the FCA's clone firm page says to call 0800 111 6768 if there are none. A newsletter-style seller will often have no record at all, which is consistent with the publisher's exclusion and is not by itself evidence of anything.

Keep your own record from the first day. Save each alert as it arrives, with the time, and import your fills into a trade journal; the options are in trade journals. After a few weeks, set your results beside the service's tracker for the same calls. That comparison is the only track record that is about you.

Report manipulation where it is handled. In the US, the SEC's tips and complaints system takes reports of "manipulation of a security's price or volume" and of fraudulent offers of securities. In the UK, report to the FCA on the number above.

A free group chat that tells members which stock to buy and when is a different business, paid by the order rather than the subscription; that one is described in how a stock-tip group chat makes money from your order.

This page describes how published records are built and what regulators have alleged and found in named cases. Whether a particular service's record is honest is something only its log and your own fills can tell you.