A forty-second video, a line going up and to the right, and a sentence along the lines of "1% a month, no stress". The format is so familiar that nobody does the sum any more. So here it is, once: 1% a month is 12.7% a year. Kept up for twenty years, it turns €10,000 into €108,900.
For comparison, global equities (the MSCI World index, dividends reinvested) returned 8.5% a year from 2008 to 2025, in dollars, before fees and tax. At that pace the same €10,000 would have become €51,100 over twenty years. The promise is not asking for a little more than the market. It is asking for roughly double the market's result, every single year, for two decades.
This is not a piece against people who make money content. Some of them explain a PEA or the fees on a life insurance contract better than plenty of bank branches do, and for free. It is about how to read what they say, and how to check a claim against your own figures before believing it.
Who listens, and why it matters
The AMF's 2025 savings barometer, a survey of 2,120 people carried out between 19 September and 3 October 2025, gives the order of magnitude. Before investing, 4% of French adults name influencers or online finance communities as a source of information. The share rises to 8% among 18-to-24-year-olds and 10% among 25-to-34-year-olds. A bank or financial adviser is still far ahead at 42%, and AI tools, named by 11%, have already overtaken influencers.
Four per cent sounds small. A second AMF study, published on 15 July 2026, explains why the headline undersells it. The regulator matched retail orders on CAC 40 shares with the daily number of posts on X during 2024, and found that investors under 35 and neo-broker clients respond to the volume of posts, not to their tone. On noisy days, when everyone trades more, they step up their activity twice as much as everyone else. What moves them is not the argument. It is how many people are talking.
What French law has required since June 2023
The law of 9 June 2023 on commercial influence set three rules that bite directly on finance.
Advertising has to be visible. Content that is paid for, in money or in kind, must carry a clear label such as "publicité" (advertising) or "collaboration commerciale" (paid partnership), readable for the whole video. The factsheet ESMA and the AMF wrote for influencers is blunt about it: not in small print, and not just in the hashtags.
Some products cannot be promoted at all. Particularly risky financial products, such as binary options, certain CFDs and forex, are off limits for influencer promotion, and so are crypto-asset services from unregulated firms. Since the EU's MiCA regulation started to apply on 30 December 2024, a crypto platform needs an authorisation, and France's transition period for firms that were merely registered ended on 1 July 2026.
Breaches are criminal offences. Up to two years in prison and a €300,000 fine.
Two details matter to the reader. First, "this is not financial advice" protects nobody: the ESMA factsheet says so in plain words. Second, the law is enforced, but checks are rare next to the number of accounts. In 2024 the consumer protection authority, the DGCCRF, inspected 287 influencers and found problems with 46% of them, according to its annual figures as reported by franceinfo. Those checks follow complaints, so the rate does not describe creators in general. What it does say is that a post reaching your screen has not been checked by anyone first.
There is also a "responsible influence" certificate, issued by the French advertising standards body ARPP, with a financial advertising option built with the AMF: 25 multiple-choice questions, 75% needed to pass. It shows that someone knows the advertising rules. It does not show that their advice is any good.
Survivorship bias, in one division
Take 10,000 trading accounts playing heads or tails against the market. Each year, half of them beat the index by pure luck. After five years, 10,000 halved five times leaves 312 accounts that have beaten the market five years running.
Those 312 people have a story, screenshots and a very good reason to start a channel. The other 9,688 have nothing to post. A feed only ever shows the survivors, and nothing in their track record tells skill apart from luck.
Real life is less even than a coin toss, because active trading pays fees on every round trip. The AMF followed 14,799 retail CFD and forex clients from 2009 to 2012: 89.4% had lost money over the four years. A screenshot of gains shows one row of that table, rarely the date the account was opened, and never the accounts that were closed.
Who pays, and how
The most useful question in front of any money content is not "is this person right?" but "how does this person get paid?". Each model pulls in a known direction.
Affiliate deals pay for account openings or trading volume, so they push you to open an account and to trade. Courses and "methods" earn on the sale, whatever the method then delivers. Platform ad revenue follows views, and a spectacular promise gets more views than a reminder about fees. None of it is illegal as long as it is disclosed. All of it is worth knowing before listening to the rest.
Subscriptions to trading "signals" are the easiest to price. At €50 a month you pay €600 a year. On a €10,000 portfolio that is 6%, roughly what the market returns in an average year. If the portfolio earns 6% a year and the subscription comes out of that return, the capital is still €10,000 after twenty years, to the euro.
Assumes a 6% gross annual return, compounded yearly; fees are taken off the return (6% minus 0.2%, 1% or 2.5%). The €50-a-month subscription is paid at the end of each year out of the return. Before tax, in nominal euros. IgniFI calculation.
Between 0.2% and 2.5% in fees, the gap reaches €10,985 on a single €10,000 investment. For someone putting in €500 a month for twenty years, €120,000 in total, the same difference in fees takes the final pot from €221,700 down to €172,400. Close to €50,000, for one line in the small print.
Red flags, and what can be checked
| What you see | What it often hides | What can be checked, and where |
|---|---|---|
| "x% a month", "guaranteed income" | Arithmetic nobody can sustain: 1% a month is 12.7% a year, 3% a month is 42.6% | Convert to an annual rate and set it against the 8.5% a year global equities made from 2008 to 2025 |
| A screenshot of gains | A hand-picked period, no starting point, no losses | Performance over the whole period, with dates, net of money paid in; a statement rather than a screenshot |
| A promo code or a "partner" link | A bonus per account opened, or a cut of the fees | The "publicité" or "collaboration commerciale" label, compulsory in France since 2023 |
| "Last spots", "before it takes off" | Manufactured urgency to cut thinking short | Nothing serious vanishes in 48 hours; the ESMA factsheet lists pressure among the signs of a scam |
| A platform you had never heard of | A firm not authorised to operate in France | The AMF's register of authorised firms and its blacklists |
| CFDs, forex, binary options | Products on which 74% to 89% of retail accounts lose money | Influencers are banned from promoting them in France |
| A course costing several hundred euros | Income from selling, not from the method | The cost as a share of your capital: €600 is 6% of €10,000 |
| "This is not financial advice" | A phrase with no legal effect | What is actually being recommended, and who earns from it |
Sources: AMF; ESMA and AMF factsheet for finfluencers (2025); ESMA press release of 27 March 2018 on CFDs; MSCI. Annual rates calculated by IgniFI.
Testing a claim against your own numbers
Four steps are enough in most cases. Take a common one: "this dividend strategy pays 8% a year in passive income".
An annual rate and a time frame. 8% a year is clear. "1% a week" is not: it compounds to 68% a year, which usually ends the conversation.
Fees and tax. In a French ordinary brokerage account (compte-titres), dividends pay the 31.4% flat tax since January 2026, so 8% gross becomes 5.49% net (8 × 0.686). In a PEA held more than five years, only the 18.6% social charges remain, leaving 6.51%. The same "8%" is not worth the same thing from one account to another, and videos rarely say which they mean. The rates are set out in our piece on the 31.4% flat tax.
Where the money comes from. A dividend is not extra return: on the ex-dividend date the share price drops by the amount paid. What counts is total return, dividends and price change together. A share that pays 8% and loses 5% of its value over the year has returned 3%.
The boring alternative. The right benchmark is not zero. It is what a hands-off investment would have made with the same payments on the same dates. If the method does not beat that after fees and tax, all it adds is work.
That last comparison is the one people skip, because it needs their own figures: what they paid in, when, and what the account is worth today.
Where IgniFI fits
IgniFI recommends no investment and sells no course. The app measures: the real performance of each account, contributions and fees included, its internal rate of return, and a comparison with an index that would have received exactly the same payments on the same dates. It is the most direct way to find out whether a method seen online has actually made anything on your money rather than somebody else's.
This blog applies the same test to itself. IgniFI's founder publishes a copyable portfolio on eToro, and two older articles on this blog contain a referral link, labelled as such. This one contains none.
Sources
- AMF, 2025 savings and investment barometer (in French), December 2025, sources of information by age, p. 21.
- AMF, study of retail investor behaviour in CAC 40 stocks in the age of social media, 15 July 2026.
- Law no. 2023-451 of 9 June 2023 on commercial influence and influencer abuses on social networks.
- ESMA and AMF, "Finfluenceurs : nos conseils pour une promotion responsable", 2025.
- AMF, the responsible influence certificate in finance now covers MiCA, 24 April 2025.
- franceinfo, nearly half of the 287 influencers inspected in 2024 had irregularities (in French).
- AMF, study of retail investors' results trading CFDs and forex in France, 2014; ESMA press release of 27 March 2018.
- MSCI, MSCI World index factsheet; 2008-2025 annualised return calculated in our piece on systematic trading.