Insights · Performance Analysis

How to read a Myfxbook track record (and what can mislead you)

Published: 22 August 2026 · by the QuantGovernor team

Myfxbook is an independent service that connects directly to a broker account and publishes its results, so that performance can be verified by anyone instead of claimed by the seller. That makes it the de-facto standard for judging trading strategies — but only if you know what each number means, and where a perfectly genuine page can still paint a misleading picture. This guide covers both.

Start here: the two verification badges

Before any number, check the badges on the account's page:

• Track Record Verified — Myfxbook has confirmed the trading history directly from the broker's records: trades cannot be edited, deleted or backdated by the account owner.
• Trading Privileges Verified — Myfxbook has confirmed the account owner actually controls the account (not just a read-only view of someone else's).

An account missing either badge is not evidence — it is a screenshot with extra steps. Both badges, plus a public account number, are the minimum bar. Every account we publish meets it.

The core numbers, one by one

• Gain — the compounded, time-weighted return: what the strategy earned in percentage, adjusted for deposits and withdrawals. This is the headline figure, and the fairest one for comparing strategies.
• Absolute gain — profit divided by total deposits, ignoring timing. Useful cross-check: when Gain and Absolute gain diverge wildly, money moved in and out a lot — ask why.
• Balance vs Equity — balance counts only closed trades; equity includes the floating P&L of open positions. A balance that only rises while equity dips deeply below it is the signature of unrealized losses being kept open. This single comparison tells you more than most other metrics combined.
• Drawdown — the largest peak-to-valley drop in equity, in percent. It measures the worst experience an investor would have lived through. Read it together with the gain: a 40% gain with 35% drawdown and a 20% gain with 5% drawdown are not even playing the same sport.
• Profit factor — gross profits divided by gross losses. Above 1 the system makes money; how far above tells you the margin of safety. Beware values computed on very few trades.
• Win rate and average win/loss — meaningful only as a pair. A 90% win rate with an average loss ten times the average win is a coin with a bomb on one side. A 45% win rate with wins twice the losses is a healthy asymmetry.
• Trade duration and frequency — tells you what kind of animal you are looking at: scalping, intraday, swing. It should match what the strategy claims to be.

Where a genuine page can still mislead you

Everything below can happen on a fully verified account — the numbers are real, the impression is not:

• The equity gap trick — strategies that average into losing positions (grids, martingales) can show months of smooth balance growth while equity swings violently below the surface. Always open the chart, enable the equity line, and look at the distance between the two.
• Win rate cosmetics — closing many tiny winners and holding rare huge losers manufactures a beautiful win rate. The average win/loss ratio exposes it instantly.
• Drawdown that hasn't happened yet — a low historical drawdown on a young account mostly means the strategy hasn't met its bad market yet. Length of history matters as much as the number.
• Deposit make-up — fresh deposits after losses can make the balance curve look repaired. Check the deposit/withdrawal history against the curve.
• Cherry-picked windows — monthly tables and custom date ranges let anyone quote their best stretch. Judge the full history, always.
• Demo and cent accounts — Myfxbook tracks them too, and they look identical at a glance. Check the account type: simulated execution belongs to testing, not evidence — we covered why in Backtest vs live trading.

A 60-second checklist

1. Both verification badges present, real (non-demo) account, public account number.
2. History long enough to include losing periods.
3. Equity line vs balance line: how deep do the dips go?
4. Drawdown read next to gain, not instead of it.
5. Win rate read next to average win/loss, never alone.
6. Deposits and withdrawals consistent with the story the curve tells.

How this applies to our accounts

We publish every system with the full page open: Olympus, XAUUSD Adaptive Breakout and Copy Gold each link their Myfxbook account, and each strategy page states its maximum drawdown next to its gain — deliberately. Where a system uses position averaging, as part of Copy Gold does, we declare it on the page and track its components separately, because that is exactly the case where the equity line deserves your attention. Apply the checklist above to us with the same severity you would apply to anyone else: that is what the pages are built for.

Next steps: how copy trading works · compare the strategies. Past performance is not indicative of future results.