“Guaranteed Profit” Is the Reddest Flag in the Book

If you read only one chapter of Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps, Chapter 11 might be the one to pick. It tackles what Bick identifies as one of the single most reliable indicators of fraud in the entire investment space: the guaranteed profit claim.

Bick lays out the regulatory reality clearly: no legitimate financial product can guarantee investment returns, and any regulated financial professional making such a guarantee would be committing a serious violation of securities law in most jurisdictions. This isn’t a gray area — it’s about as close to a bright line as finance gets.

The book is particularly useful in flagging the soft-language workarounds scammers use to avoid the word “guarantee” while implying exactly that: phrases like “consistent daily profits,” “risk-free returns,” or claims that a system “never has a losing day.” Bick argues these phrases are functionally identical to a guarantee and deserve the same level of skepticism.

One of the book’s most memorable observations concerns what a genuinely honest trading record actually looks like: even historically successful traders and funds experience losing days, losing months, and occasionally losing years. A platform whose displayed track record shows a perfectly smooth, upward-sloping line isn’t showing an unusually good trading system — Bick argues it’s very likely showing a number that was never connected to a real market in the first place.

This chapter gives readers an almost instant screening tool: if the returns line looks too smooth, question it immediately. Real markets are messy, and real trading records reflect that mess.

For anyone who has ever looked at a dashboard showing consistently perfect, upward performance and wondered whether that seemed a little too good — this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps confirms the instinct was right to be suspicious.