What I kept noticing in my inbox this week
I didn't have a single clean chart setup to anchor this week's entry. Markets were choppy — the kind of week where experienced traders sit on their hands and newer ones overtrade. That contrast, between patience and noise, ended up pointing me somewhere more personal.
Because what filled my week wasn't a specific price level or a macro catalyst. It was a flood of messages — in French — from people who had been burned. Not by the market. By the content they'd consumed before ever placing a trade.
A twenty-three-year-old from Lyon who'd paid several hundred euros for a "formation" that turned out to be a repackaged YouTube playlist with a private Discord attached. A woman from Dakar who had followed a francophone "mentor" on Instagram for months, internalized his signals as gospel, and blown through her initial capital before realizing he'd never explained what a spread was. A guy from Laval, twenty minutes from where I'm writing this, who told me he couldn't find a single serious French-language resource on Smart Money Concepts that wasn't either a sales funnel or a scam.
None of these are isolated cases. This is the week I finally decided to write about it directly.
The structural gap nobody wants to talk about
Here's the uncomfortable truth: learning to trade seriously, with real methodology and real risk awareness, is significantly harder if your primary language is French.
The highest-quality trading education — the textbooks, the institutional research, the rigorous retail frameworks — is overwhelmingly in English. When that content does get translated or adapted into French, it often passes through a layer of intermediaries who are more interested in selling a lifestyle than transmitting a craft. The result is a francophone trading ecosystem that's disproportionately populated by two types of content: pure entertainment dressed as education, and outright predatory schemes targeting people who are already financially precarious.
This isn't a cultural critique. It's a structural one. The English-language trading world has its own share of grifters — plenty of them. But the sheer volume of legitimate English content creates a kind of dilution effect. You can find bad actors, but you can also find Andreas Clenow, you can find the CMT curriculum, you can find serious communities debating actual methodology. That counterweight exists.
In French, the counterweight is thin. And the predators know it.
What makes this particularly damaging is the profile of who gets targeted. Francophone markets — West Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, Quebec, parts of Europe — include large populations of people who are genuinely curious about financial markets, often underserved by traditional financial institutions, and hungry for accessible education. That's not a vulnerability to exploit. That's a community that deserves better.
The scam playbook is depressingly consistent: luxury aesthetics, vague promises about freedom and income, a training program priced just high enough to feel serious, testimonials that are either fabricated or cherry-picked, and zero actual methodology. No discussion of drawdown. No conversation about position sizing. No acknowledgment that most people who trade lose money, and that the ones who don't have spent years building a real edge.
When I started Adesto AI, this gap was part of what I was trying to address — not as a mission statement, but as a practical reality. The traders I wanted to build tools for, the ones I wanted to teach at the Académie, were francophone. And I kept running into the same wall: the baseline education they'd received before reaching me was often so distorted that the first thing we had to do was undo damage, not build knowledge. That's expensive in time, in confidence, and in capital already lost.
What does "doing it differently" actually look like? For me, it starts with refusing to promise outcomes. It means treating the person on the other side as someone capable of handling complexity, not someone who needs to be seduced by simplicity. It means explaining what a concept costs you before explaining what it might earn you. It means being honest about the fact that algorithmic tools — like the EAs we build — are frameworks for structured decision-making, not magic. That distinction matters enormously, and most francophone trading content never makes it.
It also means accepting that serious education is slower and less viral than a highlight reel. A forty-five-minute breakdown of liquidity sweeps will never get the same engagement as a screenshot of a green trade. That's fine. The people who stay through forty-five minutes of honest methodology are the ones who might actually build something durable.
What I'm watching — and asking — going into next week
The market question I'm sitting with is a quieter one than usual: what does the francophone trader of 2026 actually need right now? Not want — need.
There are a few structural things I'm paying attention to. The regulatory environment around financial content creators is tightening in France and progressively in Quebec. That's going to shake some of the more egregious actors out of the ecosystem, which is good. But it also risks creating a content vacuum if legitimate educators don't fill it.
I'm also watching how AI-generated trading content in French is evolving. The quality floor is rising — it's getting harder to distinguish a credible-sounding explanation from an accurate one. That's a new kind of noise problem, and it puts even more pressure on the question of trust signals. Who do you actually trust, and why?
No price levels this week. No zones to watch. Just an open question I'm carrying into the next few days: if you're a francophone trader who found your way to real methodology, how did you get there? What cut through?
I genuinely want to know.
— Mahugnon, from Montréal
⚠️ Personal observations for educational purposes only. Does not constitute financial advice. Trading derivatives carries a high risk of capital loss.
