What copy trading is, and what it is not

Your money never leaves your own account. The broker reads the strategy account’s trades and reproduces them in yours, at a size worked out from your balance and your settings. Nobody withdraws, nobody holds, nobody has your password.

That is the difference from handing money to a fund or a managed account: the position is in your account, under your name, and you can close it or stop copying without asking anyone.

A signal is a message telling you what to trade. You read it, decide, and place the order yourself, which means your fill depends on when you saw the message and how fast you acted.

Copy trading removes that step. Nothing arrives for you to act on, because the order is already placed. If you want to choose which trades you take, copy trading is the wrong tool.

Two accounts copying the same strategy from different starting dates end up with different numbers. Your entry prices, your deposit, your multiplier and your broker’s fills all move it, and execution differences are normal rather than a fault.

A published record tells you how the strategy behaved. It does not tell you what your account will do, and anyone presenting it as a forecast is selling something.

Risk. A losing stretch in the strategy is a losing stretch in your account, at your size. The published drawdown is the number that tells you how deep that has gone before, and it is the one to read first.

It also does not remove the decision. Choosing which strategy, how much to allocate and when to stop is yours, and those three choices decide most of your outcome.