What copytrading is

Trades, mirrored into your account

Copytrading is an arrangement in which the trades placed in one trading account are automatically repeated in another. The first account belongs to a strategy provider. The second belongs to you. When the strategy opens a position, the same position opens in your account, scaled to your account size. When the strategy adjusts it or closes it, yours follows. You never place the trades, and you never need to be at a screen when they happen.

The copying is done by the broker’s own platform, not by the provider. In our case that is RoboForex CopyFX. The broker describes the two roles plainly: a Trader shares a strategy, and their trades are copied to the accounts of the Investors who subscribe; an Investor subscribes to a Trader and has those trades copied into their own account. In this series Infinity is the Trader, you are the Investor, and the connection between the two accounts is called a subscription.

That is the whole mechanism. Everything else in this series is about where the money sits, what each side can do, and how to check it.

Three things it is not

Most of the trouble people get into with copytrading comes from mistaking it for one of these:

• It is not a fund. You do not send money to the provider, and your money is not pooled with anyone else’s. There are no units, no fund manager, no redemption request. Your money is in your own account and nowhere else.
• It is not a managed account. Nobody logs in to your account on your behalf. The provider never holds your password, never sees your login and cannot change a setting. The platform mirrors trades, and that is the only thing that crosses from their account to yours.
• It is not a loan or a deposit with the provider. You are not lending anyone money and nobody owes you a return. The account is a trading account at a broker, in your name, exactly as if you had opened it to trade yourself.

If a provider asks you to send money to them, to share your login, or promises a fixed return, what they are offering is not copytrading, whatever they call it.

How it differs from signals

A signal service sends you instructions: buy here, stop there, target there. You then have to execute them yourself, at whatever price is available by the time you see the message, and decide each time whether to follow. Results vary from subscriber to subscriber and rarely match the published ones.

Copying removes the gap. The trade is executed in your account at the same moment as in the strategy account, at the same size relative to your equity, without a decision on your part. That is what makes a track record meaningful: the results you see on the strategy page come from the same trades, at the same moments, that land in your account. The lesson on automatic copying explains the small differences that remain.

What the provider can and cannot do

The provider can:

• open, modify and close positions in their own account, which are then mirrored in yours;
• set the conditions of the strategy: the performance fee, the minimum deposit, and whether subscriptions are open or by request;
• publish the strategy’s track record, which the broker and Myfxbook verify independently.

The provider cannot:

• withdraw, deposit or move any money in your account;
• log in to your account, see your credentials or change your settings;
• take a payment from you outside the fee the platform calculates and settles itself;
• stop you from pausing, disconnecting or withdrawing at any time;
• guarantee a result. The broker’s help centre states it directly: the Investor chooses which Trader to follow and is fully responsible for the results, including losses.

The last point is the one to read twice. Copying means you take the strategy’s drawdowns as well as its gains, in your own currency, with nobody covering the difference.

What you keep control of

Everything except the individual trades:

• The account. It is yours, at the broker, verified against your identity. You see every position, every fee and every cent in real time.
• The money. Deposits and withdrawals are yours alone, at any time, without asking anyone.
• The scale. The copy settings decide how large each copied trade is relative to your account. You choose them, and you can change them.
• The switch. You can pause copying, which stops new trades while keeping the subscription, or cancel it entirely. Neither needs the provider’s approval, and the provider cannot reverse either.
• Your own trades. The account remains an ordinary trading account, and you could place trades in it yourself. Do not. Anything you add changes the equity the copy engine sizes from and makes your results impossible to compare with the strategy’s.

What copytrading is good for, and what it is not

It is good for one thing: getting a strategy’s results into your own account without learning to execute it yourself, while keeping full custody of the money. It suits people who have read the track record, understood the drawdown in euros, and can leave the account alone through an ordinary bad patch.

It is not good for anyone who wants to approve trades one by one, who will disconnect at the first floating loss, or who needs the money on a date. The strategy decides when to trade. If you want a say in each trade, you want to trade, not to copy.

How this series goes

The next four lessons are the four practical steps, in the order you will take them: opening an account that is entirely yours, funding it with capital only you can touch, connecting it to the strategy through a subscription, and living with the copying once it is running. Each one comes back to the same principle: your account, your money, your control, and our rules copied into it.