Request a review
Nothing sensitive is asked for at this stage. No statements, no keys, no account numbers. A description is enough to scope the work and quote it.
What to put in the first message
Five lines is usually enough to scope the work and quote it.
- Market: foreign exchange, crypto, or both.
- Platform the record comes from. MetaTrader 4 or 5, cTrader, TradingView, an exchange, or your own system.
- Roughly how long the history covers, and roughly how many closed trades it contains. Ranges are fine.
- Whether the method is discretionary, rule-based, automated, or some mix that is hard to describe in one word. That last answer is common and not a problem.
- The question you actually want answered. One sentence.
The last point matters more than the rest. “Why am I losing money” and “why did this stop working in March” and “is this safe to trade at four times the size” lead to three different pieces of work, and knowing which one you want changes both the scope and the fee.
What comes back
A reply setting out which of the six review areas apply to your case, what the work would cost, and how long it would take. Where the sample looks too short to carry a conclusion, the reply says so and suggests what to record between now and a later review. That answer is free and it is given more often than most people expect.
If the work goes ahead, terms are agreed in writing first and data moves second. Never the other way round.
What is never requested
Account passwords. API keys carrying trade or withdrawal permission. Wallet seed phrases. Remote access to your terminal. Exchange keys, where they are used at all, are read-only, and you revoke them the day the report arrives. Nothing on this page asks for a statement, a file or an account number, and no request for one will come before terms are signed.
Direct contact
Written contact is preferred over a call at this stage, for a practical reason rather than a stylistic one. A description written down can be re-read while looking at the numbers. A description given over the phone gets remembered selectively, usually in whichever direction flatters the method.
If your record is short
Write anyway, but expect the reply to recommend waiting. Under about fifty closed trades there is very little a review can establish that the trader could not establish alone in an afternoon, and charging for that would be difficult to defend. What a reply can do at that stage is tell you what to start recording now so the eventual review has something to work with. Most people do not log the two or three fields that turn out to matter most, and adding them retroactively is impossible.