How to read the rankings as a beginner: Score, badges and the columns that matter
ConfirmedTrades team · 22 June 2026 · 7 min read
A beginner's walkthrough of the ConfirmedTrades rankings: what the Score and grade mean, which filters to tick first, and why not to pick the steepest line.
What the rankings are, and what they are not
Learning how to read the rankings as a beginner is mostly about learning what not to look at first. The Rankings page lists published trading accounts, both automated (EAs, forex robots, trading bots) and manual, ordered by a Score. Browsing is free and you do not need an account. It is not a shop. ConfirmedTrades does not sell anything listed there, takes no commission, and does not give investment advice. If you want to copy a trader or buy an EA, you contact the publisher directly.
That matters because it changes your job. You are not choosing from a menu. You are looking at evidence, and deciding how much of it there is.
Tick these two filters before anything else
At the top of Rankings you can filter by All, EA, Manual or Prop-firm, and there is a "Verified only" tick box. Tick it. It hides every account that has not been broker-verified, meaning independently confirmed at the broker. An unverified account with a beautiful curve is a story; a verified one is a record. Start with records.
Then pick EA or Manual depending on what you are actually considering. If you are thinking about running an auto trading robot yourself, the EA list is where the relevant evidence lives.
The Score and the grade
Every account has a single Score from 0 to 100, with a letter grade: A+ is 90 and above, A is 80 to 89, B is 70 to 79, C is 60 to 69, D is 50 to 59, and E is anything below 50. The Score blends five things: profitability, risk, consistency, how long the account has run, and how well the results are verified. Click into any account and the score card shows the breakdown.
Why a blend rather than just the gain? Because gain alone rewards recklessness. Risk 50% of the account on one trade, get lucky, and you have a spectacular gain for a week. The Score is built so that the same gain earned with small, steady risk over a long time scores higher than the lucky week. For a beginner, this is the kindest column on the page, because it does the first round of thinking for you.
The columns, in the order a beginner should read them
Most beginners read left to right and stop at the gain. Try this order instead:
- Verification label: self-reported, live-synced or broker-verified. Decides how much you can trust everything else.
- Account type: Real or Demo. Demo results are flattering for reasons explained in demo vs real account.
- Max drawdown: the worst fall from a peak, as a percentage. A 40% drawdown means that at some point the account had lost 40% of its high. Could you have held on through that?
- Time running and trade count: a year and 300 trades is a record. A month and 25 trades is a guess.
- Gain: shown as a time-weighted return, which means deposits and withdrawals do not distort it. Read it last, and read it next to the drawdown.
A quick way to compare two accounts
Suppose account A shows 80% gain with a 45% max drawdown, and account B shows 30% gain with an 8% max drawdown, both over a year and both verified. Which is better? Most beginners pick A. Most experienced traders pick B, and the reason is simple arithmetic. B made roughly 3.75 units of gain for every unit of pain; A made about 1.8. And B's worst moment was a bad month, while A's worst moment was the kind that makes people switch the robot off at exactly the wrong time.
You can also open accounts side by side to compare gain, drawdown and consistency directly. Do that with any two you are torn between.
Things the rankings deliberately show you
Several features exist to stop the page being gamed, and knowing about them helps you trust what you see. The worst drawdown an account has ever reached is recorded permanently and only ever gets worse; deleting and reconnecting the account does not reset it. Verified totals and headline stats are always public, even when an owner hides other sections. And each account carries an AI strategy analysis that flags common red flags such as martingale, grid, missing stop-losses, or everything riding on one symbol.
Owners can delay how soon each recent closed trade appears, to stop people copying them live. So if the last few trades seem to be missing, that is usually the reason, not a cover-up.
Explore, and what to do after the rankings
Explore is a live feed rather than a league table, handy for seeing what is active right now. Once an account catches your eye, open its page and use reading a trading account page as a map. If the record belongs to an EA you are tempted to run, how to vet an EA is the next step, and win rate is lying will save you from the most common beginner misreading of all.
Do it in one place
On ConfirmedTrades, every published account shows its verification badges, an AI strategy analysis that flags martingale, grid and missing stop-losses, the full drawdown and risk stats, and execution costs per symbol — so you can vet a strategy before you trust it, or prove your own.