Frequently asked questions

Live broker verification means that every trade shown on your Trade with Trust profile is pulled directly from your brokerage account over a secure, read-only connection — not typed in by you, not screenshotted, not reconstructed from memory. When you connect a brokerage, we establish a link through SnapTrade (a regulated financial-data aggregator used by major consumer fintech products) or through the broker's own OAuth flow for brokers that offer one, such as Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE, Tradier, TradeStation, and Alpaca. The link is scoped to reading trade history and current positions and nothing else.

Once the connection is live, executed trades flow into your account automatically as they settle. For each fill, we record the ticker, side (buy or sell), quantity, price, timestamp, fees, and any options-specific fields (expiration, strike, multiplier, leg structure). Individual fills are then reconciled into round-trip trades using first-in-first-out matching — the same accounting default almost every retail broker uses for tax lots — producing closed trades with a definite entry price, exit price, and realized P&L that ties back to specific rows in your broker's own record.

Open positions are handled separately and refreshed against the broker in real time. When you publicly declare a position while it is still live, the platform confirms with the broker that you actually hold the position at the declared entry and size, and re-checks periodically while it stays open. When you close it, the exit fill and realized P&L are pulled from the same live feed and attached to the original public post. This is how open-position verification eliminates after-the-fact 'I called it' claims — a trader either publicly staked the trade while it was live, or they didn't.

Because every number on your profile comes from a broker transaction, aggregate stats — win rate, total P&L, best trade, worst trade, average hold time, percentage return — are computed on the fly from those verified rows using formulas anyone can inspect. There is no manually adjustable 'reported' figure sitting alongside the verified one.

Every major US retail brokerage and dozens of international ones are supported. Live read-only connections currently cover Robinhood, Webull, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE, Tastytrade, Tradier, TradeStation, Alpaca, Public, and Vanguard, with new integrations added through our SnapTrade partnership. If your broker is on that list, connection takes about a minute and trades sync automatically as they settle.

If your broker is not on the live-connection list, you can still build a fully verified track record by uploading official brokerage statement PDFs. Statements are the same documents your broker would produce for a regulator or a tax audit, and effectively every US broker and most international brokers issue them monthly or annually. The parser identifies your broker's statement format, extracts each transaction row (buys, sells, options exercises, assignments, expirations, dividends, fees), and reconciles those fills into round-trip trades using the same first-in-first-out logic used for live-connected accounts. The result is a list of closed trades that is indistinguishable from what a live connection would produce.

Statement upload also works for accounts you have since closed, for years before you signed up for Trade with Trust, and for accounts held at smaller or foreign brokers we don't yet connect to live — Merrill Edge, Wells Fargo Advisors, JP Morgan Self-Directed, Ally Invest, SoFi Invest, Firstrade, Questrade, Wealthsimple, Degiro, Trading 212, and similar. If a broker issues a PDF statement, it is supported. The full current list of live-connection brokers and statement-only examples lives on our supported brokers page, along with details on how each connection is established.

If you'd like to see your broker added to the live-connection list, email us a sample of your statement and let us know which broker it is. We prioritize live integrations by user demand.

The most important thing to understand about the Trade with Trust connection is that it is strictly read-only. The tokens we receive from your broker authorize us to read your trade history, your open positions, and enough account metadata to distinguish one account from another. They do not authorize placing trades, canceling trades, transferring cash, initiating withdrawals, wiring funds, changing beneficiaries, or any other action on your brokerage account. This is not a policy — it is the scope of the token itself, enforced by the broker, and there is no code path in our application that could ask for anything more.

Broker credentials never touch our servers. For OAuth brokers (Schwab, Interactive Brokers, E*TRADE, Tradier, TradeStation, Alpaca), you authenticate on the broker's own domain, review the requested read-only scope on the broker's own consent screen, and grant access there. We only ever receive a scoped token. For credential-based brokers connected through SnapTrade (Robinhood, Webull, Fidelity, Tastytrade, Public, and others), credentials are entered into SnapTrade's PCI-compliant interface, never into Trade with Trust, and again we only receive a scoped read-only token. SnapTrade is a regulated specialist used by consumer fintech apps precisely because of this security model.

Because the access is read-only, even a full compromise of Trade with Trust's servers could not be turned into unauthorized trading in your account. The worst-case blast radius is unauthorized reading of trade history, not unauthorized trading — and we treat that data seriously too: personally identifying data (legal name, account numbers, tax ID, cash balances, deposits, withdrawals) is never rendered on your public profile, never returned by any public endpoint, and never stored in a form used for public rendering.

You can disconnect any brokerage at any time from your settings, which revokes access immediately at the broker level. You choose which accounts feed your verified history and which individual trades or positions become public posts. Nothing on your account is public by default.

Yes. Losing trades appear on your verified record with the same detail as winning trades — entry, exit, quantity, timestamps, realized P&L — and they count toward your aggregate stats: win rate, total P&L, average return per trade, and every ranking. This is not a bug. It is the entire point of a verified track record.

The screenshot-based trading corner of the internet lets traders show only their wins. A single lucky day, cropped and reposted, becomes a career-defining flex. Losses are hidden, forgotten, or reframed as 'lessons.' Followers see a highlight reel and mistake it for a track record. Verification is what breaks that cycle — but only if losses are visible, which is why they are visible on Trade with Trust.

This is enforced structurally, not by asking traders to be honest. When you connect a brokerage or upload a statement, every trade in that account is imported and every trade counts. Selective delete of individual verified trades is not offered — a trader cannot cherry-pick winners by quietly removing losses one at a time. If you want a trade off your public feed, you can unpost it (remove it from the feed), but the underlying verified trade stays in your record and continues to count toward your stats. Removing a post is transparent — it doesn't change your win rate.

The one legitimate lever is account-level inclusion: you can choose which brokerage accounts feed your public record (for example, exclude a retirement account or a small experimental account). But this is all-or-nothing per account, and when a trader has excluded any account, a 'Selected accounts' chip appears next to their verified badge so viewers can see the record reflects a subset of connected accounts. There is no trade-level equivalent, by design. If a losing trade is in an included account, it counts.

Broker statements are the same documents your brokerage would send to a regulator or produce for a tax audit. They are the authoritative record of what happened in your account — every buy, every sell, every options exercise, every assignment, every expiration, every dividend, every fee. PDF statement verification uses those documents as the source of truth for building a verified trading record, in cases where a live broker connection is not available or not preferred.

When you upload a statement, our parser identifies your broker's statement format (each major broker has a distinct layout), extracts every transaction row, and reconstructs your trading activity in the same terms your broker uses. Fills are then matched into round-trip trades using first-in-first-out accounting — the same tax-lot logic almost every retail broker applies by default. The result is a list of closed trades with exact entry price, exit price, quantity, and realized P&L, each one traceable back to specific rows in the original statement.

Options are handled explicitly: assignments and exercises consume open contracts correctly, expirations close positions at zero, and multi-leg structures (spreads, iron condors, calendars) reconcile leg-by-leg so the realized P&L on a closed options trade matches what the broker actually settled. Because statements are the definitive record, statement-derived verified trades are equivalent to live-connection verified trades — the verification badge does not distinguish between them beyond a 'Live Verified ⚡' vs 'Imported 📄' label to indicate the source.

Statement upload is the mechanism that lets a trader bring a verified history from before they signed up, from brokers we don't connect to live, or from accounts they've since closed. The underlying statement PDF is stored securely, encrypted at rest, used only for verification, and never shown on your public profile. Once trades are reconciled, the statement itself is not required to be kept accessible — the verified rows stand on their own.

Everything except the trades you choose to publish stays private. Your public profile shows a username you choose, an avatar you upload, a bio you write, aggregate stats computed from your verified trades, and the specific posts you have chosen to publish. Nothing else is exposed to viewers or accessible through any public endpoint.

Private-by-default categories include: your legal name, brokerage account numbers, cash balances, buying power, deposits, withdrawals, wire transfers, dividends, interest, tax identifiers, beneficiary information, statement PDFs, broker credentials (which we never receive in the first place), your email address, notifications preferences, connected devices, and any brokerage account you have not opted to include in your public record. These categories are never shown on any profile, never returned by any public API, and never used to compute anything that appears publicly.

The public profile route on tradewithtrust.net is served through a dedicated public-safe database view that structurally cannot expose private columns — even a bug in application code cannot leak fields that aren't in the view. Row-level security policies on the database enforce that any authenticated user can only ever read or write their own data. The scan-and-parse flow for statements runs in a trust boundary that cannot write to your public profile without the reconciled trade going through the same verification pipeline as a live-connection trade.

You also control which brokerage accounts feed the public record and which individual trades or positions become public posts. Trades imported for verification stay private unless you explicitly publish them. You can keep a personal or experimental account entirely off Trade with Trust, or connect it privately just for your own record-keeping without ever posting from it. Removing a post takes it out of the feed for you and every follower. Disconnecting a broker revokes our access immediately at the broker level and stops all future syncs from that account.

The trading corner of Twitter, Instagram, Discord, YouTube, and TikTok runs on screenshots — P&L images, order confirmations, position windows — and screenshots are trivially faked. A screenshot can be edited in a browser's inspector in ten seconds, generated from a template, cropped to hide size, dated forward or backward, or reused from a lucky day years ago. There is no way for a follower to know which is which. This dynamic is why so many followers get burned by traders whose 'track record' is a highlight reel curated in Photoshop.

Trade with Trust is the opposite mechanism. Every trade on your profile originates from your broker, not from you. You can choose whether to publish a specific trade, but you cannot invent it, edit its price, change its P&L after the fact, or hide a loss by deleting the underlying record. Manual entry is not offered as a shortcut to a verified badge — there is no path from a claim to a verified row that bypasses the broker.

This also changes how following works. On screenshot-based platforms, followers see the trader's editorial choices — the wins that got posted, in the moment they chose to post them. On Trade with Trust, followers see the record: the wins and the losses, the hold times, the size, the ratio of good calls to bad calls, computed from verified trades. Open-position verification adds the piece screenshots can never do: proving a call was made in real time, not after the fact. When a trader publicly declares 'long NVDA from $482' while the position is live, the platform confirms with the broker that they actually hold it. Later 'I called it' posts don't count if the position wasn't verified while it was open.

The practical difference is credibility that compounds. Every verified trade adds another proven data point to a record that speaks for itself. A trader with two years of verified history — every trade, every win, every loss — is telling a fundamentally different story than a trader posting a curated feed of screenshots. This is the difference verification makes.

Yes, at two levels. At the account level, you choose which brokerage accounts feed your verified history. If you have a retirement account you would rather keep off Trade with Trust, or a small experimental account whose trades you don't want mixed with your main record, you can exclude it entirely — no trades from that account will ever appear on your profile or count toward your stats. When any account is excluded, a 'Selected accounts' chip appears next to your verified badge so viewers can see the record reflects a subset of connected accounts. This preserves the anti-cherry-pick guarantee at the trade level while giving you legitimate control at the account level.

At the post level, individual trades are private until you explicitly publish them. Trades imported through a live connection or a statement upload sit in your account as verified rows, but they do not appear on your public feed until you post them. You can unpost a trade at any time to remove it from the feed for you and every follower. Unposting removes the post; the underlying verified trade continues to count toward your record and stats, which is what prevents unposting from becoming a cherry-pick lever.

Nothing on your account is public by default. Connecting a broker does not automatically publish anything. Uploading a statement does not automatically publish anything. Publishing is always an explicit action.