Your Public Trading Profile: Slugs, Redirects and What Visitors See 2026

You published an account. There is now a URL with your name in it, and two questions you probably did not think about before clicking save: who can actually reach that page, and what happens to everything you already shared if you change the address.

Both have exact answers, and they matter before you paste the link into a Telegram channel or send it to a prop firm: two kinds of public URL, three visibility states, and a slug you can change once every 30 days and leave behind under a permanent redirect.

The numbers come from our own database on 19 August 2026: 10,000+ connected accounts, thousands of them published as public pages. They describe accounts published on ShowMyTrades, not traders in general.

🔗 Two URLs, Two Different Things

There are two public addresses, and people confuse them constantly.

/trader/your-brand is your profile: one page per person, listing every account and portfolio you have chosen to publish. It is the link you put in a bio.

/account/your-account is a single track record: charts, statistics, monthly returns, costs, trade history. It is the link you send when someone asks for proof of one specific system. What every number on that page means.

Both slugs are generated automatically the first time you publish — a database trigger fires the moment visibility changes. The profile slug is built from your brand name, which is why the platform refuses to publish a profile without one. The account slug is built from the account name. If the obvious slug is already taken, a numeric suffix is appended: demo, then demo-2, then demo-3.

After that, the slug is frozen. Renaming the account later does not move the URL, and that is deliberate: the link is already in circulation.

When you pick your own slug instead, the field checks it against the server as you type, applying the same rules the save endpoint enforces:

• 3 to 30 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and dashes only
• no leading or trailing dash, no two dashes in a row
• the ptf- prefix is reserved for portfolios
• around thirty reserved words are refused — admin, api, dashboard, explore, login, signup, widget, docs, blog and pricing among them

A custom account slug is checked against every account, every portfolio, every deleted account and every retired slug; a custom profile slug against every profile and every retired profile slug. Accounts and profiles use separate namespaces, so /account/atlas and /trader/atlas can belong to two different people.

👁️ Private, Published, Unlisted

Every account and every portfolio sits in one of three states. Profiles have only the first two.

Private is the default, enforced on the server: the public URL answers 403 to every visitor, you included — you read the account from your dashboard, not from its public address. One honest detail: that 403 page still names the account and, if your profile is published, links to it. The numbers stay hidden; the account's existence does not.

Published is the normal public state: the page is live and the account appears on your trader profile, in the Explore feed and in the community counters.

Unlisted is the one people miss. The page works exactly like a published one — same charts, same statistics, same widgets, same slug — but the account is removed from your public profile, from the Explore feed, and from the account search in the Widget Builder. Whoever has the link sees everything; whoever does not, never runs into it.

It exists for a specific job: sending one client the stats for that client's account, without turning your public profile into a directory of everyone else's money. Across the platform 37 accounts carry the unlisted flag — a small feature, but the people who need it really need it.

One caveat: unlisted means not listed, not not findable. These pages stay in the sitemap and carry no noindex tag — a deliberate choice. If a URL must never be seen, the correct state is private.

📄 What a Visitor Actually Sees

Your trader profile shows the avatar, brand name, bio, the community role badge earned by referring other traders, a count of the accounts you have published, and whichever social links you filled in — website, X, Instagram, YouTube, Telegram, Discord. Below that, every published and listed account and portfolio appears as a card with balance, equity, gain, drawdown and last update.

Visitors can search your accounts by name, filter by platform, sort seven ways — gain, balance and drawdown in both directions, plus last updated — and page through twelve at a time. The page also emits Person structured data, so search engines read it as a person rather than a wall of numbers.

699 of our users run more than one account and 429 run accounts at more than one broker. Without a profile page those track records are a pile of unconnected links; with one they are a body of work at a single address.

Each public account page also counts its own traffic. The info icon next to Account Stats opens two lines — when the account was created, and its public view count, rate-limited to one view per IP every 30 minutes so refreshing does nothing. Across the platform, public account pages have taken 94,710 visits. Visitors see that number too.

At the bottom of every account page sits Other accounts by this trader: up to four more of the owner's pages, pulled from the same profile endpoint. Unlisted accounts are excluded there as well.

🚫 What Is Never Public

Your email address, ever. The endpoint that builds a public profile selects an explicit list of columns — name, brand name, bio, avatar, slug, join date, referral code and social links — and email is not on it. There is no public row-level policy on profiles either: every public page is served through a server-side API that decides what leaves the building.

Your investor password. For MT4 and MT5 accounts connected that way, the credential is read server-side only to decide whether the Track Record Verified badge applies. It is never included in the response.

Beyond that, you control the page contents item by item from the account settings modal, and one tab does most of the work.

Section Visibility switches whole modules off the page — Monthly Returns, Advanced Statistics, Currency Pair Statistics, Trade History & Balance Progression, Terminal & Open Charts, Smart Insights — and directly below them, under the Privacy Options heading, seven switches hide individual details on public pages and widgets alike: Open Trades, Closed Trades, Account Number, Lots, Trade Comments, Stop Loss / Take Profit, Trade Notes.

A separate Chart Visibility tab goes finer still, turning individual charts, and individual lines inside them, on and off.

Use them with judgement: every module you hide is a question a reader will ask anyway, and a track record with the drawdown chart switched off tells its own story. Why verified data beats a curated screenshot.

✏️ Changing Your URL: 30 Days, One Hour, One Redirect

The auto-generated slug is rarely the one you want on a business card. The rules let you fix that without letting anyone churn through URLs.

One change every 30 days, per entity. Your profile and each account have independent counters.

One hour of grace. From your first change you have 60 minutes of unlimited edits, to fix a typo. The window does not reset with each edit — it starts at the first change and closes an hour later, after which the slug is locked for 30 days counted from that first change.

A permanent 301 redirect. The slug you left behind redirects to your current page and stays reserved, so nobody else can claim it. It points at the account rather than at a specific new slug, so if you change again in six months the original URL still lands correctly.

That redirect is wired into six public endpoints, including the widget and widget-image ones. Widgets embedded on external sites keep working after a slug change, resolving the old slug transparently.

🛠️ Doing It Inside ShowMyTrades

For an account. Open the account from your dashboard and click the settings gear. In the General tab you will find the Visibility dropdown — 🔒 Private, 🌐 Published, 🔗 Unlisted — and directly beneath it the Public URL field. That field appears only once a slug exists, so a never-published account has nothing there to edit yet.

Click Edit next to the URL, type the slug you want, and availability is checked as you type: Available in green, Slug already taken or a format reason in red. A warning panel spells out the consequences before you commit, then Change URL saves it. Afterwards the field shows either an amber Editable for XX more min badge, or a Locked until (date) badge once the hour has passed.

Portfolios are the exception. They have all three visibility states, but no URL editor: a portfolio keeps the ptf- slug it was given at first publish.

For your profile. Go to Dashboard → Settings → Profile. Profile Visibility and the Profile URL editor sit at the bottom of the same form and behave identically. Remember that a brand name is required before a profile can be published at all.

Checking the state at a glance. The header of each dashboard account page carries a status pill — Published, Unlisted or Private — with copy-link and open-in-new-tab buttons beside it. If an account is public while your profile is still private, an amber warning triangle appears alongside, explaining that you will not appear in the community or have a dedicated page.

⚠️ Five Mistakes That Cost People Their URL

1. Publishing accounts but leaving the profile private. The account page works, but there is no /trader page, no listing in Explore, and no way for a visitor to find your other work. Across thousands of registered profiles, this is the most common half-finished setup we see.
2. Spotting the typo at minute 70. The grace hour is short on purpose: check the URL the moment you save it, click it, read it back. After 60 minutes it is yours for a month.
3. Treating unlisted as a security setting. It hides you from listings, not from search engines, and anyone holding the link has full access. Sensitive means private.
4. Renaming the account and expecting the URL to follow. It does not, by design. Change the slug explicitly if you want the address to match — and spend the monthly change knowingly.
5. Deleting an account to free its slug. Deleting leaves a tombstone: the URL reports that the account has been removed and links to your profile, while the slug stays reserved. Deletion is not a rename.

❓ FAQ

Will my embedded widget break if I change my URL? No. The widget and widget-image endpoints resolve retired slugs through the same redirect table the pages use. An embed on someone else's website keeps rendering without anyone touching the code.

I changed my slug twice inside the grace hour. Which old URL redirects? Only the one you held before the hour opened. Intermediate slugs used during the hour never become permanent addresses and are released for anyone to take.

Can someone else grab my old URL? No. A retired slug stays reserved by its redirect and fails the availability check for everybody else. You can reclaim it yourself once your 30-day lock expires.

Is my email address visible anywhere on a public page? No. Public pages are built by server-side endpoints that select named columns, and email is not among them. Visitors see your brand name, bio, avatar, role badge and whichever social links you added.

What happens to a public link if I switch the account back to private? The page returns 403 immediately, to visitors and to you alike, and any widget pointing at it stops rendering. Redirects from your retired slugs go quiet too — they only resolve while the account is published. The slug stays yours: switch back to published and every link works again.

Do unlisted accounts show up in Google? They can. There is no noindex on them and they remain in the sitemap. Unlisted removes you from listings on ShowMyTrades, nothing more.

🔗 Related Guides

• How to read a trading account dashboard — every metric on the page a visitor lands on
• How to verify your trading account — earn the badges that make a public page worth reading
• Verified vs unverified track records — why broker-synced data is a different category of evidence
• The complete guide to tracking your trading performance — what to monitor once the page is live

See how other traders set theirs up. Every profile linked from Explore is live and broker-synced, with the URL, bio and module choices its owner made.

Connect your first account free and your page gets its own address in minutes.