For long-term investors and active traders, options included
Are your returns skill or luck?
Whether you buy and hold, collect dividends or trade options every week, Luck Filter connects to your broker and works out your real returns, your risk, what you pay in fees, and whether your results are bigger than luck alone would explain.
- Read-only access. We never see your password
- Multiple brokers on Plus and Pro
- Delete anytime
- How we keep it safe
Set against investors with no skill, taking the same market swings.
The sample account finished above 83 of 100 of them. That is in the thick of the crowd, where luck alone usually lands.
A chart of 200 made-up investors with no skill: each takes the same market swings as the account and has no edge of its own. About 95 in 100 of them finished between −27% to +162%. Sample account finished at +87.2%.
Skill check against S&P 500 (SPY)
Indistinguishable from luck
Once the market's moves are taken out, what is left over is too small and too noisy to separate from chance (t = 0.95, p = 0.34). That is true of most records this short.
A rough estimate, not the p-value. It assumes the typical investor trails the market by 3% a year and that real skill varies by about 5% a year either way, then weighs your record against that.
Show the numbers: alpha, beta, t-stat and p-value
- Alpha (yearly)
- +16.7%
- Beta
- 1.88
- t-stat
- 0.95
- p-value
- 0.34
Works with
The brokers you already use.
Sign in once and your history arrives on its own. There is nothing to export and nothing to type in. Interactive Brokers is the one exception: a free report you set up once, in about ten minutes.
Schwab
Interactive Brokers
Fidelity
Robinhood
AJ Bell
Chase
E*Trade
moomoo
Questrade
tastytrade
Trading212
Wealthsimple
Wells Fargo
Bux
DEGIRO
Empower
Public
Stake Australia
TD Direct Investing
Vanguard US
Webull
Zerodha
Connections run through SnapTrade, our data partner, and how far back your history goes depends on the broker. Broker names and logos belong to their owners and are shown only to say which brokers can be connected.
What you get
Honest numbers, and an honest answer.
- 38%Unlikely
The chance your edge is real, in one number
A verified record anyone can check
Every month's return, the losing ones included
- Did selling pay off?
- Cost you $34,529
- Did options beat shares?
- Cost you $10,096
Every closed trade set against the plain alternative
- Trading fees$190.95
- Interest on borrowing$131.43
- Account and other fees$99.00
Every dollar your broker took, added up
- and 15 more
Connects read-only to the brokers you already use
Spot the lucky one: four investors, one with a real edge. Can you tell which?
What a review reads like
With Plus or Pro, a weekly plain-English review explains your record, and Pro lets you ask about any number on the page. Every sentence comes from your own numbers, and every review ends the same way, so it is always clear what it is and what it is not: it explains, and never tells you what to buy, sell or hold. Pick a stretch of the sample account to see it change.
Adjusting for the money you added and took out, your account returned +32.8% the past 12 months, against +12.4% for the S&P 500 (SPY). Net deposits over the period were $11,000, which are not counted as performance.
Day to day, returns moved with an annualised volatility of 21.7% and a Sharpe ratio of 1.25. The deepest fall from a peak was 11.8%, from Mar 11, 2026 to Mar 30, 2026, and it was regained by Apr 8, 2026.
You are ahead of the benchmark, but by an amount luck could easily produce over 12 months (t = 1.18, p = 0.24). If the same pattern held, roughly 1.8 more years of data would make it clear. A record under a year is short, and short records flatter luck, so give this less weight.
Educational analysis of past data. Not investment advice.
Trade review
Not just how you did. How you traded.
Every position you opened and closed, set against the plain alternative. Did selling pay off, or would holding on have done better? Did you give back gains? Did your picks beat the index? Did your options beat simply owning the shares, LEAPS included?
Every answer says which way it went: green when your choice came out ahead, red when the plain alternative would have done better. It is a record of what happened. Hindsight makes every choice look clearer than it was, so it never tells you what to do next.
Sample account
- Did selling pay off?
- Cost you $34,529
- 49 of the 71 stocks you sold kept rising over the 30 days after you sold. Holding on 30 more days: +$44,106, of which $9,577 is the market's rise, given how much each stock moves with SPY.
- Did you give back gains?
- Gave back $24,474
- Your 68 share trades that were ever in profit were up $60,086 at their best and finished at +$35,611. 3 of them were up 5% or more and still ended in a loss.
- Did options beat shares?
- Cost you $10,096
- Your options made −$8,874. The same bets made with shares would have made +$1,222.
- How much premium did you keep?
- 118% kept
- of the $8,238 you collected selling options. None of the contracts you sold was assigned.
Fees
See every dollar your broker took.
Commissions on each trade, margin interest, wire and withdrawal fees, ADR fees, platform and data charges. Your broker lists them one line at a time, among thousands of others, and almost nobody adds them up. We do, year by year.
Then we set the total against your account: the share of your gains that went to fees, what they come to a year as a share of the account (the way a fund's fee is measured), and what an average trade cost you. Tax withheld from your dividends is shown beside it, kept apart, since it goes to a government, not your broker.
See it in the demoSample account
- Paid to the broker
- $421
- A year, on the account
- 0.10%
- Per trade
- $0.90
Where it went
- Trading fees$190.95
- Interest on borrowing$131.43
- Account and other fees$99.00
Year by year
- 2025$304.83 · 0.17% of the account
- 2026 so far$116.55 · 0.04% of the account
Verified record
Prove it, without sending a screenshot.
Anyone can post a return. A verified record is a page of your results that comes straight from your broker's own history, and that nobody, you included, can edit. You choose what it shows, and whether it shows amounts or percentages only. Your holdings and account numbers are never on it.
- Share it with an adviser, a friend or a forum, with one link.
- Switch the link off whenever you like.
- Search engines don't list it.
An investor's record
Live: updated every nightHistory from Dec 27, 2024 to Oct 30, 2026, against the S&P 500 (SPY)
- Return since Dec '24
- +87.2%
- SPY: +29.5%
- A year, on average
- +40.6%
- SPY: +15.2%
- Sharpe ratio
- 0.95
- Sortino 1.43
- Worst fall
- −44.4%
- swings of 41% a year
- 2024 −2.0%
- 2025 +47.4%
- 2026 +29.6%
Skill check against the S&P 500 (SPY)
Indistinguishable from luck
Chance the edge is real
How it works
Connect once. It runs itself.
- 1
Connect a broker
Sign in on a secure page run by your broker or by our data partner, SnapTrade. We never see your password, and the connection can read your history but never trade.
- 2
We do the maths overnight
Your history is kept exactly as your broker sent it, and every number is worked out again from that. No spreadsheets and no formulas to fix.
- 3
Read the verdict
See your returns, your risk, and a plain answer to the question most trackers skip: is this more than luck?
Questions
Good to know.
Is this investment advice?
No. It describes what already happened in your account. It does not recommend buying, selling or holding anything and it does not predict prices. The AI reviews follow the same rule.
How does the skill-or-luck test work?
We compare your daily returns with a benchmark such as the S&P 500, then measure the part of your result the market's moves do not explain. That leftover is called alpha. A t-statistic and a p-value say how easily luck could produce a leftover that size. A t-stat above 2 or below −2 is the usual line for "not random". Often the honest answer is "not enough data yet", and we will tell you roughly how much more it would take.
Does it cover options?
Yes. Your account value already includes what your options did, and option trades, expiries, assignments and exercises are part of the history we read. The trade review shows how much premium you kept on options you sold, how closing early compared with holding to expiry, and whether your options did better than the same bets made with shares.
Which brokers work?
The 22 shown above connect through our data partner SnapTrade. Most use a sign-in on your broker's own page. A few, such as Vanguard US, Wealthsimple and DEGIRO, take your broker username and password on SnapTrade's secure page instead, which we never see. How much history each broker shares varies.
Can it trade or move my money?
No. The connection is read-only.
What will it cost?
Three plans, each with a 7-day free trial, paid monthly or yearly: Core for one account, Plus for a few accounts with a weekly plain-English review, and Pro for more accounts and a guide you can ask about your own record. The pricing page shows what each one includes.
What happens to my data?
It is used to work out your numbers and for nothing else. The privacy policy names every service that touches your data, and you can delete everything yourself from your account, at any time.
Is the demo real?
Partly. The demo account follows a real account's day-by-day returns (one of ours), started at $145,000, so its return, alpha and risk figures are real. The deposits each month, the holdings and the trades are made up. Every number comes out of the same maths that will run on yours.
Find out which it is.
Join early access to see your own when we open, or look around a sample account now.