The Definitive Ross Cameron Post
I've seen a lot of Ross Cameron posts in recent months, with plenty of debate around whether he's legitimate or not, if he's a pump-and-dumper, or this and that. As someone who's watched him for just under a decade, I wanted to make a post to finally settle things for everyone. To be clear - what I am about to say is not speculation; it's based on observation and independent verification that I've done for myself over that decade, so you'll be hard-pressed to argue against me, though you're welcome to try. I'd love to be proven wrong.
First, to get the big thing out of the way - yes, he is legitimate. He makes actual money from the actual trades he shows.
Second, no, he is not a pump-and-dumper - at least not technically, and I'll get to that in a second.
Lastly, yes his strategy *can* work if you're really skilled and disciplined. The strategy itself is standard momentum scalping. He targets low-float stocks with huge pre-market catalysts, looking for quick breakouts on small time frames. He proved the model works early on when he built his account up from a few hundred bucks before he had any kind of following. If you trade with small size, like 1,000 shares, the strategy is perfectly viable. The best of us should expect ~50-55% win rate with 1:1.5 to 1:2 risk, again, *if you're really good*.
What you and I *can't realistically* (or reliably and over the long term) do, however, is trade with his size, nor can we expect to get anything like his 70%+ win rate. Why is that, you ask?
Queue SpongeBob rainbow hands: *The Audience*
The secret sauce that allows him to post ridiculous gains and maintain multi-month green-day streaks is the audience. You might think you know where I'm going with this, and I know what you're thinking: "A guy with a chatroom full of people doesn't have enough liquidity to move markets," and normally you'd be right! I recently commented on this, and I'm just going to copy my response to that here: Ross doesn't trade under normal circumstances. Most of his trading is well before traditional market opening, meaning market maker algos and other traders in general are far less active, leaving any given price point on the level 2 with far less available stock, often just in the hundreds or thousands for any given price point. So. When you have a few thousand people all buying at the same time, it doesn't take much, especially on a low-float stock, for several price levels to be taken out in a matter of milliseconds.
Yes, the stocks he trades often do millions in volume *eventually*, but he's usually only trading the first one or two pumps of the initial move, meaning he's in early, allowing him to benefit most from the flood of volume that is *boosted largely by his audience after he announces his trade, before much of the rest of the market has woken up to see what's happening.*
So what does this mean? It means that his trades are more likely to work through sheer brute force due to his audience of thousands adding buying pressure, saving what might have otherwise been a failed breakout. It's as simple as that.
If we had to estimate, we can imagine conservatively that his audience gives him an increase of about 10%-15% to his win rate, which doesn't sound like much, but is huge if you're already skilled. It can mean the difference between a profitable day and a flat or red day, and is the main reason why you'll never see him trade without an audience these days.
This last bit is about scalability. You and I will not be able to reliably trade 20,000-30,000 shares on the same stocks he trades. The amount of slippage we would get on these would mean immense losses in the long run, even if it works sometimes and you manage your adds and reductions with discipline. Intentionally or not, his audience is supplying a large amount of his exit liquidity, as they are often still buying when he begins to sell - it's the inevitable nature of a delayed stream (and, to his credit, largely why he says not to follow his trades, but people do it anyway).
And that's pretty much what I have to say. Just to add - his videos on how to trade, market structure, patterns, how to trade them, etc., are all good and standard momentum trading stuff. You can learn from him and watch him, and you may even succeed having done so - just keep your expectations in check, and understand that you will likely never see the profits or win rate he posts. Not with this strategy, anyway.
TLDR; Ross Cameron is legitimate. His strategy works for the most part as long as you are disciplined and skilled, with the realistic expectation of a 50-55% win rate. His audience likely contributes ~10-15% to his win rate, as well as providing exit liquidity for his large share size, which can't be done reliably without the audience.
EDIT: There is no way to realistically quantify his audience edge, but given what we know about pre-market mechanics, the win rates that career momentum traders report (around 50-55%), and Ross's own reported win rate of ~70%, we can conservatively, and reasonably, estimate that his audience provides that 10-15% boost.
Statistically, it's more likely that the difference between a 55% win rate and a 70% win rate isn't about making better trades; it's about how many marginal or failing trades get saved.
Example: If Ross takes 100 trades, statistical baselines dictate that roughly 45 of them should fail based on organic market structure and what we know about breakout failure rates. However, because his audience introduces a concentrated wave of buying power the moments after he enter,s a portion of those 45 failing trades are artificially forced upward just enough for him to escape with a small profit or a break-even fill.
To bridge a 15% gap in a 100-trade sample, the audience only needs to "rescue" 10 to 15 trades that would have otherwise hit his stop-loss. Given that thousands of people are viewing his stream and reacting to his alerts, a 10% to 15% rescue rate seems a highly conservative estimate of the crowd's impact on a thin order book
To address the FTC settlement: the crux of that FTC suit is not that he was a fraud; it's that his advertising was misleading, making trading seem easy when, in fact, most of his customers lost money. The suit does not address whether his system did or didn't work - only that the marketing didn't properly disclose the real risk, which is why every one of his videos now has a disclaimer.