On Products That Genuinely Contain a Model
Some do. A small classifier trained on round history is easy to build and will happily output varying percentages all day. Its outputs are real numbers produced by real code; what they are not is information about the next digit, because the training data contained none. That distinction is invisible from the outside, which is why the validation artefact matters more than the technology claim.
It also means the people building these are not necessarily dishonest. A team can believe the pattern-matching means something, because the market rewards confidence rather than measurement and nothing forces the comparison against a control.
One Question That Sorts the Market
Ask for held-out validation results in chronological order with losing calls included. Any team that genuinely trained a model has this file, because they could not have evaluated their own work without it. The replies we receive are consistently about proprietary methods rather than about the chart.
The protocol for producing your own figure is on the prediction apps page, and every guide is on the home page.