The Truth About Copytrading, and Why I Offer It Anyway?

⏱ 6 min read

Start with the part that should make you suspicious. When you copy my trades through the broker, I earn a rebate on every lot you trade. Not on your profit, on your volume. On the other hand, my copytrade or any copytrade provider will have profit sharing scheme and I am offering 80/20 profit sharing scheme at this point of time where we take 20 and it is really competitive in the market.

Hence you can finish the month down and I still get paid.

That is the whole article, really. Everything after this is me explaining why I think the arrangement is still worth doing, and where it quietly goes wrong for people who are new.

A volume rebate is the same shape as paying a mechanic per part replaced instead of per car fixed. Most mechanics are honest and most will do right by you. But when he is standing there genuinely unsure whether your brake pads have another few thousand kilometres in them, the incentive leans, and the uncomfortable thing about incentives is that they lean without the person noticing. I spent a fair bit of time reading how broker rebate structures actually work before I set mine up, and once you see the mechanics you cannot unsee them. Anyone offering you copytrading who says they have no conflict is either not telling you the truth or has not bothered to look.

So why offer it at all. Two reasons, and both are structural rather than promises.

First, I never touch your money. The account is in your name at the broker, you fund it, you withdraw from it, and you can disconnect the copier at two in the morning without messaging me for permission. That is a very different animal from handing cash to someone running a pooled account, where getting out means asking the person holding the money to let you out.

Second, you are copying my live trades, not signals I produce for an audience. Same entries, same instruments, my own capital on the line first. If I started churning positions to farm rebates, I would be paying the spread on every one of those trades before you did. That is the only conflict check I actually trust, not a screenshot, not a track record, a structure where the person is exposed to his own decisions before you are.

There is a quieter reason too. I hold a full time job in engineering, so my method has to be swing based, positions held over days, sessions reviewed at night. Low frequency is a terrible way to farm a volume rebate. If I were designing this to maximise what I earn from you, I would be scalping and telling you it was a feature.

Now the part nobody puts in the screenshot. Drawdown.

Every equity curve you are ever shown is a finished picture, and finished pictures are painless. Living inside one is a completely different experience. Four losers in a row lands in week two, your account is down six percent, and you have to decide, with no history to compare against, whether this is normal or whether the thing is broken. I know that sequence is normal because I have traded this method for years and I have sat through it more than once. You have no such memory. So you feel it as evidence.

Which produces the pattern that actually costs new copiers money, and it has nothing to do with the strategy being good or bad. People connect after a strong run, because that is when the curve looks most convincing, and they disconnect in the middle of a drawdown, because that is when it feels worst. So they receive the losing stretch in full and none of the recovery that follows it. The strategy did not fail them, the timing of their own emotion did. Nobody sells you a course on that, because there is nothing to sell.

So, should you do it if you are new?

My honest answer is yes, but only alongside actively learning, and I mean that as a condition rather than a nice extra.

Copytrading with the terminal closed is a slot machine with a monthly fee attached. Copytrading with the chart open, asking why this level, why this size, why now, why nothing for four days, is closer to an apprenticeship where the tuition is paid in spread instead of in blown accounts. Think of hiring a personal trainer. He can teach you, correct your form, stop you from wrecking your back in month one, and none of that transfers if he is the one lifting the weights. Muscle is not transferable, and neither is judgement. The account grows, you do not, and the moment you are on your own you are exactly as inexperienced as the day you started, only with more confidence, which is worse.

None of this is advice, it is a plain description of my own arrangement so you can judge it.

I used to think the question people should ask me was whether I am profitable. That is the wrong question, because everyone answers yes and screenshots cost nothing to produce. The right question is what happens to the person on the other side when you lose. Ask me that, ask anyone offering you a copier or a signals group, and watch whether the answer is specific.

So before you connect anything, do four things. Ask how the person gets paid, in exact terms, and if the answer is vague, stop there. Ask for the worst drawdown and how many weeks it lasted, not the return. Decide in advance the minimum number of trades you will sit through before you are allowed to disconnect, and write that number down while you are calm, because you will not be calm when it matters. And keep your own notes on twenty copied trades, your reasoning next to mine, before you judge either of us.