The “95% Win Rate” Trick Explained

Win rate is one of the most commonly cited, and most commonly misleading, statistics in trading marketing — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps devotes real attention to explaining exactly why a high win rate can mask a genuinely terrible strategy.

Bick’s central point is mathematical rather than merely cautionary: a high win rate sounds impressive, but it says nothing about the size of wins versus losses. A strategy that wins ninety-five percent of the time with small gains but loses big on the remaining five percent can still be catastrophically unprofitable overall — a pattern Bick notes is well documented in real, legitimate trading strategies that sell out-of-the-money options, showing this isn’t purely a fraud-specific phenomenon.

The book then pivots to the fraud-specific angle: fabricated win rates are simply unverifiable in most fraudulent platforms, since the underlying trades are never independently audited or connected to a real brokerage account a third party could confirm. As Bick puts it, a screenshot showing a “95% win rate over 6 months” carries no more evidentiary weight than a number typed into a spreadsheet — because that is often exactly what it is.

Bick gives readers a concrete evaluation framework: ask for the average size of winning trades versus losing trades, the maximum single-day loss in the historical record, and, most importantly, a way to verify the trading history through an independent, regulated brokerage statement rather than the platform’s own internal dashboard.

This chapter is a great example of the book’s overall method — taking a statistic that sounds unambiguously positive on its face, and showing readers exactly how and why it can be simultaneously true and meaningless.

For anyone who has been impressed by a headline win-rate figure without asking the follow-up questions, this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps is a valuable corrective from Felix Bick.