How Bot Performance Gets Manipulated Behind the Scenes

Even bots genuinely connected to real markets can have their marketed performance manipulated — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps devotes Chapter 24 to explaining exactly how this happens, in ways that are more subtle than outright fabrication.

Bick describes one common technique: running many bot instances simultaneously with different, often riskier parameter settings, and only publicizing the handful that happened to perform well by chance — a form of survivorship bias applied deliberately to marketing. Out of dozens or hundreds of parameter variations run in parallel, some will inevitably perform well simply by chance, and those are the ones that make it into the promotional materials.

A second technique Bick details involves backtesting a strategy against historical data using parameters that were effectively chosen after seeing that period’s price action — a practice called curve-fitting or overfitting. This produces an impressive-looking historical chart that has no predictive value for future, unseen market conditions, since the strategy was essentially reverse-engineered to fit data that had already happened.

The chapter’s practical guidance is direct: recognizing that any single impressive performance chart could be the product of either selective reporting or curve-fitting is important context for evaluating bot marketing. Bick recommends specifically asking whether performance figures represent live, forward-tested results or backtested results, since the distinction is enormous.

This chapter connects nicely to the book’s broader emphasis on independent verification — even when a bot is technically doing something real, the marketing built around its performance can still be constructed in misleading ways that require specific, informed questions to unpack.

Felix Bick’s explanation here gives readers real analytical tools, not just suspicion, for evaluating bot performance claims presented in How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps.