You followed the call. You put real money in. It went wrong.
You went back to check the post: the entry, the stop, the target. But it was gone. Deleted. No explanation. No acknowledgement. Just a clean feed with nothing but wins.
You are not alone. And it is not a coincidence.
The Numbers Behind the Problem
According to ESMA, the European Securities and Markets Authority, between 74% and 89% of retail CFD accounts lose money. In India, SEBI data shows that 91% of individual traders in the equity derivatives segment incurred losses in FY24, with net losses widening 41% to ₹1.05 trillion, approximately $12.5 billion, in FY25.
These are not fringe cases. These are the documented, regulated, publicly reported numbers across the world’s largest trading markets.
The standard explanation is that trading is hard. That retail traders lack discipline, strategy, and risk management. That’s partially true. But it ignores something more fundamental: millions of retail traders are making decisions based on advice that was never reliable to begin with.
Fidelity reported that 41% of its younger investors seek advice from social media influencers. A BaFin survey of 1,000 investors aged 18 to 45 found that more than 50% had received financial information from finfluencers at least once, and 60% considered social media a good alternative to professional advice.
That’s a lot of money moving on the word of people with no verified track record.
The Research Is Damning
In 2023, researchers at UC Berkeley, LSU, and the Swiss Finance Institute published one of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted on financial influencers. Analysing tweet-level data from a major social media platform, they found that only 28% of finfluencers are skilled, generating positive returns, while 56% have negative skill entirely, producing average abnormal monthly returns of -2.3%.
More than half. Actively harmful advice. Not neutral. Not mediocre. Statistically worse than doing nothing.
The same study found that unskilled and antiskilled finfluencers attract larger followings than skilled ones and post excessively optimistic content that precedes price reversals.
The loudest voices. The biggest followings. The worst advice. That is the structure of the market you have been trading in.
BaFin also found that 37% of young investors are completely unaware that finfluencers routinely receive payment for their recommendations. Paid to recommend. No obligation to disclose. No record of what happened after.
The Missing Infrastructure
Every mature financial market has accountability infrastructure.
Mutual funds have independent ratings. Public companies file audited financials. Financial advisors carry regulated track records. The advice they give can be traced, verified, and held to account.
Trading influencers have operated with none of that. A post goes up. Thousands follow it. The trade fails. The post disappears. There is no rating, no registry, no permanent record. The influencer’s follower count stays intact. The losses stay with the traders.
This gap has not been an oversight. It has been convenient, for the people posting the calls.
What KillShill Does and Why
KillShill was built with a clear mission: bring accountability to an industry that has operated without it, protect retail traders from the scams, pump and dumps, and manipulations that have cost them billions, and reward the traders who are genuinely good at what they do.
The majority of retail traders losing money are not bad at trading. They are following the wrong people and had no way of knowing it. KillShill fixes the information problem that sits at the root of that.
We scrape trading calls from X(Twitter), Web, Apps, YouTube and Telegram in real time. A call only qualifies if it contains all four components of a real trade: a specific asset, a direction, an entry price, and at least one target with a stop loss. Vague alerts, pump-and-dump signals, market commentary, and bragging posts are excluded by design. Every qualifying call is tracked against the market, scored, and stored permanently.
If a call is deleted after we have logged it, it stays in the database. The outcome still counts. There is no appeals process and no way to remove a call once it has been recorded.
The result works in both directions. Bad actors get exposed, their real win rates visible for the first time, their deleted losses permanently on the record. And genuinely skilled traders get something they have never had before: a verified, independent track record that proves their ability without requiring anyone to take their word for it.
Accountability for the bad. Recognition for the good. That is the standard we are building.
The Standard Trading Never Had
KillShill is not just a tool. It is the beginning of accountability becoming the default in trading, the infrastructure this industry has operated without for too long.
Every serious market eventually builds the standard that makes trust possible at scale. That standard is now being built for trading calls.
Go Check
Search any trader you follow on KillShill. See the complete record, the calls they kept and the ones they deleted. The full picture, for the first time.