Where Should You Start?

Are you checking somebody else?

Start with the venue you found them on, because each platform fails differently and the checks that work on one are useless on another. A deleted post on X leaves no trace; an edited Discord message leaves an "edited" marker; a Telegram channel can be wiped wholesale.

• Is this Discord trader legit? — and the room-level questions: are the signals real, is the room worth its price, and where the line is between a scam and a room that simply cannot prove anything.
• How to spot a fake track record, plus the artifact-specific versions — equity curves, screenshots, win rates, backtests, testimonials and verified badges each fail in their own way.
• Verify a trading signal provider and is this trading coach legit, for when money is about to change hands.

All of them reduce to one request: every call, including the losers, timestamped before the fact, on a record the seller cannot edit. A person who has one links it in seconds. A person who does not offers a substitute, and the substitution is the answer.

Are you the one being checked?

Then the question is what your reader can establish without your cooperation, which depends entirely on who they are.

• A prop firm wants risk discipline over a sample. A trading partner wants to know what you actually did when it went wrong, which is a different question and a different document.
• What counts as a verified track record and how to prove trading results cover the general case.
• A record for trading coaches, if you teach.

Is the account not working at all?

Then the record is a second-order problem. The execution guides cost out the common failures in arithmetic rather than adjectives: widening a stop once drops that trade's average outcome from $130 to $40, going off-plan on one trade in ten turns a +65R year into +28.5R, and 30 trades cannot distinguish a 55% win rate from a coin flip — the 95% interval runs from 37.2% to 72.8%.

• Why can't I make money trading? and what should I buy is the wrong question — the two entry points to that cluster.
• Moving stops, cutting winners early, revenge trading and overtrading, each with what it costs.
• Is my edge real or luck? — the sample size question, which decides how much of the rest is worth acting on.

Do you want the arithmetic rather than the argument?

The calculators run in the browser with no account and no data leaving the page: expectancy, breakeven win rate, R-multiple, position size, risk of ruin, Kelly, drawdown recovery and the options payoff tools. Every figure quoted in the guides comes out of one of them, which is what makes the guides checkable rather than assertive.

What is kappi itself?

kappi is a trade recorder: a trading journal you can publish. You commit a trade before the fact, not after it; kappi timestamps it, seals it, and publishes it on a Merkle-anchored log you cannot edit. $15/month, no free tier.

The methodology page is the full mechanism — how a commit is sealed on your device, how the log is anchored, how R:R and RME are computed. Why $15 a month sets the price against what it has to clear. About says who publishes this and how the numbers on it are checked.

One number for why the first question is worth asking at all: US consumers reported $5.7bn lost to investment scams in 2024, the largest single fraud category the FTC tracks.^[1] Most people you will check are not part of that. The point of a record is that you no longer have to guess which — and keeping one of your own costs $15 a month, with no free tier.