A reader of my site asked me if I’d ever heard of Arduino Schenato, an apparently successful Forex trader and coach from Italy. I said no, but that I’ll check him out.
My approach in cases involving traders who sell various services (signals, coaching, courses and so on) is to consider them guilty until proven innocent. In a field where over 95% of vendors are more or fewer frauds, this should come as no surprise.
The first thing I look for is some kind of accountability – for instance, a third party verified track-record. The second thing is legitimacy: why should I spend time on this guy’s materials and eventually money too? You can quickly gauge the honesty of the person by the manner in which he addresses these two issues. There’s usually no point in going through videos, or tens of articles and pages of web content if you’re being taken for a fool at this stage.
Today I’m going to use Arduino Schenato to showcase the kind of tricks these unscrupulous individuals use in relation to the aspects mentioned above. He belongs to the price action trading camp but adds a personal touch (calling it ‘follow the winner’ (FTW) strategy). If you go to the signals page, you’ll see tables and graphs with performance (which of course can and for all we know is made up, as there is no actual verification of those numbers). In the YouTube channel, you can find videos where a monthly account statement can be seen and again the results look great. But although Schenato takes some care to hide the account number, it can be seen clearly in the screenshots below that the track-record comes from a demo account:
So not only we have the guy trading a demo account, but as if that wasn’t bad enough, we don’t even get to see a full year’s statement. All we’re shown are a few fragments of the whole puzzle.
To add insult to injury, Schenato has video testimonials too, in which a few guys scroll through Word documents or Excel tables purporting to show the gains they’ve made since buying Schenato’s coaching services.
As far as I’m concerned, these two facts are enough to put the guy on the list of ‘traders’ to be ignored because he failed both track-record and legitimacy tests and scored high on dishonesty scale.
If you use the approach I described in this article, you’ll not only save a lot of time you would otherwise waste on these pricks, but you’ll also keep your mind BS free and their hands out of your wallet.