Across more than 13,000 public position opens from January to August 2026, the most original traders beat the most derivative by nearly 500 basis points per position at 30 days.
Centaur · Research
October 28, 2026 · 3 min read
Traders should be shameless about stealing great ideas. Especially great trading ideas.
What distinguishes the good from the great is originality. Being early, contrarian, and right. That is how edge is made from chaos.
Whenever a trader posts a position, one of two things is true: either it is a testament to their original thinking, a novel perspective, or they are stealing from others. Nobody should want to steal what is already stolen.
Centaur reviewed more than 13,000 position opens shared publicly on X and Telegram from January to August 2026, to answer one question: which publicly shared trading ideas are worth stealing?
The study covered 213 traders with more than 10 trades since the start of 2026 and measured two numbers:
The trend across the population: every additional 10 points of follow rate costs roughly 0.7 points of return.
The more a trader's trades follow others, the worse the performance. On the fitted trend line, a trader with 10% of their trades being follows sits at +1.4% return per position; a trader who follows others 80% of the time sits at -3.5%.
Bucketed into quartiles, the effect is clear:
The gap between the most and least original traders is visible at 7 days and quadruples by 30.
At 7 days, the least-following quartile earns +0.3% per position against -0.8% for the most-following. At 30 days the gap quadruples: +2.5% against -2.3%. At a month's horizon, every bucket other than the quartile of the most independent and original traders shows negative returns.
Win rates tell the same story.
The most original quartile is the only cohort that makes money over 30 days.
The least-following quartile has a win rate of 50%, against 45% for the most-following.
The same applies to how late a copied trade is, not only to whether a trader is original. Centaur bucketed copied trades by how long after the original call they were opened.
A trading idea starts expiring the moment it is posted.
Trades copied within 6 hours of the original call lose 1.2% at 30 days. Trades copied 6 to 24 hours later lose nearly three times as much: -3.2%. The signal in a call starts decaying the moment it is made. Moral of the story: when you steal, steal at the source, and steal the moment it drops.
Sentiment and crowd positioning say very little until they get granular, down to who said it first and who merely repeated it. Steal only the great ideas.
Centaur has built the most comprehensive foundation for monitoring trades shared on social platforms, and is now fully focused on turning it into alpha and insight for everyone who wants to raise their trading and investment process.
