Fake Students, Real Survivorship Bias

Testimonials from supposedly successful students are among the most persuasive marketing tools in the trading education industry — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps explains in Chapter 49 why even genuine testimonials can be deeply misleading.

Bick documents outright fabrication first: testimonials are frequently fabricated, paid for, or selectively curated from a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of a course’s actual customer base. Some course sellers have been documented paying “students” a flat fee to appear in a testimonial video regardless of their actual trading outcomes, or offering commission-based affiliate arrangements to prolific promoters who never mention their financial stake in recommending the product.

But the chapter’s most sophisticated insight concerns testimonials that aren’t fabricated at all: survivorship bias plays a significant role even among genuine testimonials, since a course with thousands of purchasers will, by chance alone, produce some individuals who happened to profit during their trading period. These individuals’ stories can be legitimately obtained yet still misleading about the typical, statistically likely outcome for a new purchaser.

Bick’s recommended standard is appropriately demanding: requesting aggregate, independently verified outcome statistics — what percentage of all purchasers achieved profitability, over what timeframe, verified by an independent auditor — rather than accepting individual testimonials as representative, is the appropriate standard, though he notes candidly that few course sellers are willing or able to provide this data.

This chapter’s distinction between fabricated and merely unrepresentative testimonials is a genuinely sophisticated piece of analysis, showing readers that skepticism needs to extend even to testimonials that are, in a narrow sense, completely true.

How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps gives Felix Bick’s readers the tools to see past even honest testimonials to the aggregate reality they don’t represent.