Have you ever traded using signals?

For those who may not know, a signal or a prediction, is a trade that is publicly shared and has (in the best case) an entry point, take profit/profits and a stop loss. As a reader following a specific trader, you might repeat the trade and maybe make some money.

At some point I was obsessed with signal channels on Telegram. I started with one pretty big one, tried it for some time, was satisfied with the results, but wanted more. So I started discovering more and more channels. But as you might guess, the majority of them looked scammy. So for the time being I stuck with the ones I already trusted, but kept monitoring the ones I wasn't sure about. I was tracking the trades they were posting, seeing if the signals would perform well or poorly. But the more channels I tried to manage at the same time, the harder it became.

Because, as I said, the majority of channels, especially smaller ones, were kinda scammy. They were made only to push a product on you, or some kind of subscription. Signals were just a funnel to take money from you. On those channels, authors could delete "bad" signals that didn't perform, or edit older messages. All of this made tracking pretty difficult.

But probably the even sadder part was that even the big, more or less trusted channels wouldn't fully satisfy me. They weren't deleting anything or scamming anyone, but sometimes they would only highlight the winning signals and ignore the losing ones, and that bothered me. Because if you're sharing signals, you should spotlight not only the wins, but also the losses.

Another problem with bigger channels: they sometimes wouldn't provide full information, like stop loss or take profit levels. This way you couldn't verify whether a signal was successful or whether it stopped out. And combining that with the first problem, a trader can kind of manipulate the info. Without stop loss mentioned beforehand, they can simply not post the "losing" signals, and you'd have no way to prove if signal was successful or not, cause you lack crucial info.

Example: a trader posts a signal, price moves in the wrong direction, probably hits a stop loss (let's say at -5% or -10%), then bounces back above the entry level and goes for a take profit. The trader claims the signal was successful. Technically, it was, but cause the stop loss was never mentioned beforehand, you don't know if the trader is fooling you or not.

That's just one of the examples where I felt kinda fooled, even though technically it was all fair game. So ultimately, I stopped tracking the majority of them. It was eating too much time and getting messier and messier. Verifying a channel also takes a long time, you need to track all the trades, and if they post only a few times a week and you want to be really sure, you need a lot of data… and it takes time.

So, have you ever followed channels that provided signals? If so, for how long? Was it overall profitable? Which platform? Were the authors transparent or not?