Copy Trading

Copy trading is a venue feature that mirrors another account's trades into yours automatically, sized in proportion to what you allocate to it. The lead trader publishes a track record, you commit funds to follow them, and every position they open is replicated on your account until you stop following. Several large venues run it as a headline product, and the positions being copied are usually leveraged. What it does not do is remove risk; it substitutes a stranger's judgement for your own, and a displayed return is the past performance of an account that selected itself onto a leaderboard. Read the published figures for what they omit. A percentage return says nothing about the drawdown that produced it, or about how much collateral you would have needed to survive that drawdown without being liquidated out of the strategy at its worst point. A board ranked by return alone will be topped by whoever took the most risk and happened to get away with it, and a lead trader is under no obligation to keep trading the way they traded during the period on display. Fees are the second thing to check: most programmes take a profit share for the lead trader on top of the ordinary trading fee, and that share is usually charged per profitable position rather than on your net result across all of them.