The Leaderboard ranks Lead Traders by performance. The High Water Mark is the model used to calculate Lead Traders' performance fees fairly: they only earn on new profit above the highest peak the follower has ever reached. This means if you're in drawdown after copying someone, they don't earn from you until you've recovered.
The Leaderboard
Every active Lead Trader appears on the Leaderboard with their key metrics: total return over various periods (30 days, 6 months, all-time), win rate, number of followers, and current allocation. The board can be filtered by performance period, risk level, or instruments traded.
What to look at, beyond the headline number
Length of track record — three months of profit during a strong trend tells you very little about how a strategy holds up. Longer is better.
Trade frequency — a trader who places 5 trades a year is hard to evaluate statistically. A trader with 200+ trades has more meaningful data behind the numbers.
Risk score — nomo computes a risk metric based on volatility and drawdown. Cross-reference this with your own risk tolerance.
High Water Mark — what it is
The High Water Mark is the highest balance peak your copied account has ever reached. The Lead Trader's performance fee is charged only on profits that take you above this peak. If you're in drawdown, no fee is charged until your account recovers and exceeds the previous high. This is the same fee structure used by hedge funds and protects followers from paying performance fees during recovery from losses.
Worked example
You allocate $1,000 to a Lead Trader.
Your account grows to $1,200 — that becomes your High Water Mark.
The Lead Trader earns a performance fee on the $200 of profit. You then drop to $1,050 and recover back to $1,150.
The Lead Trader earns nothing during this stretch, because $1,150 is still below the $1,200 High Water Mark.
You then go to $1,250 — the Lead Trader earns a fee on the $50 of new profit ($1,250 minus the $1,200 mark), and the High Water Mark resets to $1,250.
Important notes
The High Water Mark protects you, the follower, by aligning the Lead Trader's incentive with yours: they earn only when you actually grow.
Past Leaderboard performance is not a guarantee. Strategies that worked in one market regime can underperform when conditions change.
Diversifying across multiple Lead Traders typically smooths returns, but no diversification is bulletproof if all your traders happen to use similar strategies.