The man who trades in truth: How to succeed as a Deriv partner
Mohammad, known across social media as thebaydounfx, didn't set out to become a trader. Like many others, he stumbled into the space pre-COVID, drawn in by a wave of trending opportunities — dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and trading — that were flooding TikTok and Instagram at the time. Six and a half years later, he's a full-time trader based in Lebanon, a top Deriv partner, and the voice behind a community that has come to know him for one thing above all else: blunt mentorship.
His path from chasing meme coins to mastering a single instrument, gold, and building an audience around radical transparency offers a rare look at what it actually takes to turn trading from a hobby into a sustainable career — and a business.
Quick Summary
- The entry point: Mohammad got into trading through the crypto and meme-coin wave, but quickly realised he needed something repeatable rather than speculative — a system he could apply the same way, every single day.
- Why gold: After studying volume profiles, liquidity, and ICT models across a basket of instruments, he narrowed his focus to gold, structuring his entire approach around the daily rhythm of the Asia, London, and New York sessions.
- The Deriv shift: After building a loyal following as a signal provider and copy trader elsewhere, he moved to Deriv for its global reach, its reputation for security, and its access to Deriv cTrader — a platform he credits with transforming his copy trading.
- His content philosophy: Rather than selling hype, Mohammad built his community around disclaimers, honesty about losses, and a refusal to promise results — a strategy he believes grows an audience slower, but keeps it real.
- Growth through collaboration: A Deriv-sponsored partnership with a major Lebanese influencer became a turning point, exposing him to entirely new audiences who had never considered trading before.
- His core advice: Be confident, be honest, and lead with calculated risk rather than the promise of easy money — for traders and aspiring partners alike.
Why did Mohammad make the crypto to gold trading shift?
Mohammad's first steps into the markets weren't calculated — they were curious. Crypto and Bitcoin came first, followed by a brief incursion into long-term investing, studying the S&P and long-duration bonds. Meme coins followed that, but he quickly recognised they weren't a foundation to build something sustainable on. What he wanted instead was something repeatable — a system he could return to every day rather than chase once and never see again.
That search led him through leveraged trading and eventually into commodities trading, where gold caught his attention. Coming from a computer engineering background, he was already comfortable with complex, pattern-based thinking, but he wanted to stay away from anything as volatile as early-stage crypto. Gold offered structure: distinct sessions throughout the day, each with its own behavior and history to actually study and master.
Over four to five years, Mohammad built a single model around a single instrument on a single timeframe, learning how the London and New York sessions interact, when setups work, and when they don't. That discipline, he says, was less about the markets and more about overcoming the instincts — fear and greed — that work against many traders. His goal was never to guess correctly once; it was to become one of the small percentage of traders who can perform consistently.
How does Deriv cTrader elevate community copy trading and mentorship?
His positive results gave Mohammad the confidence to start teaching others — first friends who remembered him as the trader who refused to quit despite early losses, then a wider circle through signals and copy trading on another broker. His path to Deriv came about a year and a few months before this conversation, after a sponsored collaboration led to an introduction.
For Mohammad, Deriv stood out for reasons beyond its well-known synthetic indices. What mattered most was that it operated as a genuine global broker — not confined to one region — at a time when trust and security were his top priorities in choosing where to go live rather than stay on demo. The deciding factor, though, was access to Deriv cTrader, a platform he says changed his copy trading in a way few other tools had, largely because of its automatic risk management and its availability across web, mobile, and desktop.
How to build an honest trading community through transparent mentorship?
Mohammad's social media strategy is built on a simple premise: most beginners have already been burned by hype, so he refuses to add to it. Having been a beginner himself once, he understood how confusing and misleading the space can feel to newcomers looking for guidance.
Rather than promising results, Mohammad leads with disclaimers. He shares his losses as openly as his gains and consistently frames trading as a calculated risk rather than a shortcut to income. It's an approach that trades short-term growth for long-term trust — a trade-off he's comfortable making. Across his TikTok lives, videos, and community conversations, he's become known as the person who tells people the harsh truth about risk, rather than the version of trading that sells easiest.
A collaboration that changed his reach
A Deriv-sponsored collaboration with a well-known Lebanese influencer marked a turning point in Mohammad's visibility. It didn't just grow his existing audience — it introduced him to an entirely new one: people who had never considered trading before but felt comfortable enough, after seeing someone they already trusted, to reach out. For Mohammad, it was a stepping stone that brought in new types of clients he hadn't reached through his own channels alone.
Meeting people where they are
One of Mohammad's most distinct traits is his ability to make technical trading concepts accessible to people with little to no background in markets or technology. He splits his community into two groups: those comfortable with tech, who mostly need clarity on risk, and those who aren't, who need a more hands-on approach.
For the second group, Mohammad relies on one-to-one conversations, group chats, and TikTok lives, along with step-by-step instructional content across Telegram and WhatsApp. He recently expanded onto WhatsApp specifically to reach clients faster, recognising that time-sensitive information doesn't always get seen quickly on Telegram.
The real risk: Trading psychology
Asked about the biggest challenges of trading and partnership, Mohammad points not to markets but to people. Trading, he explains, is one of the highest-risk environments that exists — decisions made in an instant can undo everything. Many of the people who come to him have already experienced losses elsewhere, whether through poor risk management or outright scams, and arrive frustrated and carrying unrealistic expectations.
His approach is to consistently reset those expectations: markets move in cycles, some slow and some fast, and survival through those cycles — not one lucky trade — is what separates traders who last from those who don't.
How Mohammad segments his trading community for higher retention
Scaling an honest partner network requires segmenting your community based on technical literacy to directly lower user friction and counter unrealistic market expectations.
- Tech-fluent users: Focus exclusively on risk management parameters, automated drawdown thresholds, and Deriv cTrader deployment metrics.
- Non-tech users: Deploy high-touch onboarding channels via structured chat sequences, localised community forums, and video walk-throughs to build underlying operational trust.
Advice for traders and aspiring partners
Mohammad's advice to anyone considering trading, or building a community and partnership around it, is consistent with everything else he practices: be confident, be transparent, and make things easy to understand before ever asking someone to enter the space.
"Instead of telling people, come make money with me, my approach is come take calculated risks with me." — Mohammad, thebaydounfx
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