The criteria, in detail
The five tests exist because the chat-app signal market is thick with assertions an outsider has no way to confirm. Three of them carry their own page, because they are the ones channels most often fail. The full five-test method is on the method page.
What the five tests are really sorting
A buyer rarely compares two near-identical channels. In practice you are choosing between types of service — a Telegram channel, a copy-trading room, a social caller, an aggregator, or a sealed-record desk — and each type passes or fails the tests as a category. The job of the criteria is to make that structural difference visible, so a glossy presentation cannot hide which category a service belongs to. The table below sorts the field on the two tests that decide most cases: was the call sealed before its outcome, and is the win rate shown with its full denominator.
| Service type | Sealed? | Denominator shown? | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telegram / chat channel | No | Rarely | Sender edits or deletes at will; losing calls vanish. |
| Copy-trading room | Rarely | Sometimes | Platform tracks results but seldom per-signal proof. |
| Social-media caller | No | No | Posts deletable; often monetised via affiliate links. |
| Aggregator / re-poster | No | No | Republishes others unaudited; inherits every gap. |
| Automated / AI service | Sometimes | Backtest only | A backtest is not a live result; no one owns the record. |
| Sealed-record desk | Yes | Yes | Per-call on-chain receipt plus named independent review. |
The bottom row is the only category that ticks both columns, which is the structural case the guide makes for the pick — not that it is louder, but that it belongs to the one type a stranger can audit.
Why these two columns decide most cases
Of the five tests, two do almost all the sorting. Sealed before its outcome is the one that cannot be retrofitted: a channel either anchored its calls in public before they resolved or it did not, and no amount of later polish changes that fact. Denominator shown is the one that cannot be faked without an outright lie: a win rate is only evidence when the full count of calls, losers included, sits next to it. A service clearing both has handed you a record you can interrogate. The remaining three tests — the measured grade, public pricing and clean incentives — are real, but they tend to confirm a verdict the first two have already reached rather than overturn it. That is why the table sorts on the two, and why a channel can have a polished pinned post, a busy room and a confident pitch and still land in a row with two crosses.
The three tests with their own page
A test is only marked “passed” when a buyer could confirm it firsthand rather than lean on the sender's say-so — not when the channel merely asserts it. That standard is what keeps the three pages below from being marketing copy: each one ends at a check you can run, not a claim you have to accept. Read them in the order they appear. The first, sealed before the outcome, is the load-bearing one, because it is the only test the chat-app medium makes structurally hard to fake; the other two build on it. The auditable record tells you whether the win rate has a real denominator behind it, and grades that are measured tells you whether the conviction label on a call is a number or a sticker.
Sealed before the outcome
Why a public timestamp is the one test a chat-app channel cannot wriggle around.
An auditable record
What a real track record contains, and what a pinned highlight reel leaves out.
Grades that are measured
How an A-to-D conviction grade is calibrated to a model's own returns instead of a sticker.
The remaining two tests — public pricing and clean (non-affiliate) incentives — are covered on the method page, because they are quicker to check and rarely the deciding factor.