What is copy trading?

What it means

A provider trades their own live account. Software watches that account and opens a proportional position on every subscriber account, usually within a second or two. You are not buying a strategy or receiving advice — you are duplicating someone else's executions, whatever they turn out to be.

Why it matters

Sizing is proportional rather than identical. If the provider risks 2% of their equity and your account is a tenth the size, you get a position a tenth as large risking the same 2%. That is the mechanism most people misunderstand: [copy trading](/learn/copy-trading) does not reduce risk, it reproduces it exactly. A provider who blows up takes their subscribers with them, at the same percentage loss.

What this changes in practice

The genuine trade-off against running a bot is control. A bot runs rules you can read, on your machine, with settings you own. Copy trading runs a person's judgement you cannot inspect, on their schedule, and you can stop it but never steer it. Which is better depends entirely on whether you want to understand what is happening to your money.