Copy Trading
Copy Trading links a trading account you already have to a strategy someone else trades. When the manager opens a position, a matching position opens in your account, sized by a rule you choose yourself.
Nothing moves when you start. Your account keeps the balance it had, and you keep the login. That is the part people expect to be harder than it is: there is no investment amount to enter, because you are not sending money anywhere.
The difference from MAM is who holds the dial. MAM also leaves the money in your own account, but the manager sets each investor’s allocation. In Copy you set your own sizing, change it later, and pause or stop without asking anyone. The difference from PAMM is larger: there is no pool and no rollover.
Copy sits under Invest in the portal, on the same three tabs as the other two models. Discover to browse, My investments for accounts that are copying someone, My strategies for strategies you run.
Following a strategy
The strategy page
Open a Copy strategy from Discover. The header carries the name, the COPY badge, the base currency and the line that says the account is live and verified on XBTFX servers, then all time gain, maximum drawdown, win rate and trade count.
Before you copy is the terms panel. It lists the fees the manager charges, and states plainly that your account uses the sizing you select and that you can change the settings or stop copying later.
About this strategy holds the manager’s description, the product, the base currency and the date trading started. Performance and track record is the verified record of the master account, switchable between returns and monthly returns across 1M, 3M, 6M, 1Y and all.
Balance, equity, open trades and history can each read Private. Managers choose what to publish, and a private figure is a setting rather than missing data. Growth is shown either way.
Choosing the account
Copy this strategy opens three steps: the account, the settings, the review.
Step one lists the accounts eligible to follow. Eligibility comes from the master platform, and the panel at the top of the step spells out which of your account types qualify. Accounts that do not are counted at the bottom of the list under unavailable accounts, which you can expand.
Two rules decide what you see there:
- A trading account can follow one Copy strategy at a time.
- The account has to match the eligible types for that master.
If nothing you hold qualifies, or you would rather ring fence this, Create a new account builds one inside the same step.
Sizing, direction and open trades
Step two is the whole of your control over what gets copied.
Position sizing decides the size of each copied trade:
| Scale by equity | The ratio between your account equity and the master’s equity. Open profit and loss can affect new trade sizes. |
| Scale by balance | The same ratio measured on balance. Open profit and loss does not affect new trade sizes. |
| Fixed lot size | Every copied trade uses the lot size you set. |
| Volume multiplier | The master’s trade volume multiplied by the value you set. |
Trade direction either follows the master, so buys copy as buys, or inverts it, so buys copy as sells.
Existing positions decides what happens to trades the strategy already has open at the moment you start:
- Start with new trades copies only what the master opens after you start.
- Copy all open positions opens matching positions for everything currently open, using your sizing.
- Better entries only copies just those open positions where the current market price is a better entry than the master’s original one. A better entry is not a safe one. Those positions can still lose.
Step three reads it back: the strategy and its status, the account you picked with its currency and equity, the three settings above, and the fees. The footer repeats that starting Copy does not transfer funds.
Confirm, and the summary that appears names your account and the strategy it is now copying. From there you can open the Copy dashboard or fund the account.
Your copying account
My investments lists it as Copying followed by the strategy name. Open it and the header shows current value, balance and account profit and loss, with the trading account number underneath. Add funds and Withdraw work as they do on any account of yours, because that is what it is.
Copying does not lock the account. It keeps its Trade action on the Accounts page, and you can open and close your own positions in it while it is copying. Trades you place yourself are your own. Trades copied from the manager are the ones the strategy manages, and closing one by hand closes it.
Investment overview confirms the type, currency, status, account number, platform, the sizing in force and the direction. View statement and Full account report open the account’s own records.
Open positions is what is open right now: symbol, side, size, open price and open profit and loss. Trade history is the closed record for the last 365 days, with the execution price and result of each deal.
Two investors copying the same strategy will not see the same numbers. Sizing is per account, and so is the moment you started.
Changing your settings
The Copying panel on the Details tab holds the same controls you set when you started, under slightly different names: Match my equity, Match my balance, Fixed lots or Custom ratio, plus the ratio field and the direction choice. The panel states your current behaviour in words below the direction buttons.
Save copy settings applies them. Positions already open keep the size and direction they were opened with.
Pausing and stopping
Pause copying stops new positions from opening in your account. What is already open stays open and still follows the manager’s exits.
Stop copying is the end of the subscription. It closes the copied positions, settles the fees that apply, and detaches your account. The account and the money in it stay yours, and you carry on trading it yourself if you want to.
Fees
The Fees tab splits one charge into two steps. Charged is the fee after it has been calculated. Collected means it has actually left your trading account. Both are rechecked when you withdraw or leave, and the manager being paid from their side is a separate movement again.
Spreads and commissions are not strategy fees. They show up in trade history.
Running a strategy
Publishing it
+ Create strategy on the Invest page opens the four step wizard. For Copy the first step is Signal · Copy, described there as followers copying your trades in their own accounts and choosing their own trade size.
Step two is the master account. Create a new one, or select an account you already hold. Copy masters are Pro accounts only, and accounts already acting as a master or an investor elsewhere are hidden from the list with a count of how many were hidden.
Promoting an existing account keeps its history. Investors see performance by period and your lifetime maximum drawdown, and the strategy is listed from today.
Step three is the name and the charges. Copy has three:
| Fee | Basis |
|---|---|
| Performance | Percentage of profits, charged daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly |
| Subscription | Flat amount in the strategy currency, on the same choice of periods |
| Volume | Amount per million of closed trades |
About is one line describing the strategy, and it is optional at this point. There is more room for it later on the profile.
Step four reads the type, the account, the fee and the currency back to you. The strategy runs in the account’s own currency.
Confirming lists the strategy immediately. The dialog that follows names the account that is now your master and tells you copiers follow from your next trade, with Open console and Fund account beside Done.
Listed immediately means listed. If you are not ready to be found, turn List on Markets off in Settings before you place a trade.
Funding the master
Add funds in the strategy header opens a modal with two routes: Transfer from Wallet, which moves money you already hold, and New deposit, which starts a fresh one.
A transfer asks for the wallet, the destination account and the amount, with MAX to empty the wallet. The from and to summary and the confirmation checkbox both restate the amount before the button does anything.
Funding the master is your own capital moving between your own accounts, but it is not invisible to your followers. Anyone sizing by equity or balance measures against the master, so changing the master’s balance changes the size of every trade they copy from then on.
The overview
Open the strategy from My strategies. The header carries the name, the COPY badge, the live marker and the master account number, with Add funds, Withdraw and Share strategy.
Strategy snapshot shows active followers and the performance fee, with a link through to fees and payouts. Investor-facing terms repeats the fee and shows whether the strategy is listed and whether an invite code is required.
The Master account panel is the trading account by itself: balance, equity, floating profit and loss and free margin, timestamped, and excluding investor assets because none of them are in it. View Mega1 account and Open WebTrader go to the account itself.
You trade that account normally. New trades copy out to each follower’s linked account according to their own sizing and direction settings, and their funds never leave their accounts.
Followers
The Followers tab lists every account copying you, with a count on the tab itself. Each row shows the masked follower account number, the status, the sizing rule that follower chose and their trade direction.
Sizing is not yours to set. Each follower chooses their own and can change it whenever they like, so the column tells you what they picked rather than what you assigned.
A pending request can be rejected, and Remove ends an existing follower’s subscription. Removing closes the positions copied into their account and settles any fees owed. Their own money stays in their own account, exactly as it does when they stop copying themselves.
Fees you charge
The Fees tab has two halves. Manager payouts tracks what is awaiting payout and what has been processed, with Transactions for the detail. Follower fees totals what has been charged against followers and what has been collected from them.
Each row shows its own currency, and strategy fees are kept separate from trading costs. The figure that reaches you is in your wallet history, after any partner share has been taken out.
Partners
Partners shares part of your fee income with someone who brings you followers. Invite by email and set a percentage against each of the performance, volume and subscription fees.
The percentages come out of your fee rather than being added to the follower’s cost, and they apply only to investments made from that point on. Existing investors are not affected. The invitation has to be accepted before anything takes effect, and the portal will not confirm whether the address you typed belongs to an XBTFX account.
Profile, links and privacy
One profile and privacy policy covers both your portal strategy page and your public link. Publishing creates the public link. Listing on Strategies is a separate switch in Settings, and confusing the two is the usual reason a manager thinks their strategy has vanished.
Profile holds the square strategy image, capped at 1MB, a one line headline, the About text and an optional manager location. The image saves as soon as you change it, unlike the rest of the form. The location is display text and is never taken from your verification documents.
Links sets the public page address under portal.xbtfx.com/s/ and your
social handles. Handles for social accounts, full links for Myfxbook and your
own website, and only secure links are published. A checkbox decides whether
search engines may list the page.
Changing the public page address breaks every link you have already shared.
Privacy governs open trades, history, balance, equity, assets under management and investor count, each set to public or private. The setting applies to the public link and the portal page alike, and private stays private after someone signs in.
Amounts and trade sizes are only shared when balance and equity are both visible. Growth is independent of all of it, so a manager who publishes nothing financial still has a track record on the page.
Settings
Settings is where the strategy name, the minimum entry, the listing switch and the three fees are changed after the fact. The strategy name is independent of the label on the trading account, so renaming one does not rename the other. List on Markets set to off unlists the strategy while the share link keeps working.
Fee changes apply to new followers only. Everyone already copying you keeps the plan they subscribed under.
Retiring it
Retire strategy, at the bottom of Settings, removes the strategy from the leaderboard and from every live path, and frees the master account to be used for something else. Every follower has to be detached first. It is permanent.
When something looks wrong
- You started copying and nothing opened. Expected on Start with new trades. Your account fills as the manager trades.
- An account is missing from the list when you try to copy. It is either already following a Copy strategy, or it is not an eligible type for that master.
- Your trade sizes do not match another follower’s. They are not meant to. Everyone sets their own sizing, and a fixed lot follower and an equity scaled follower will never line up.
- A position did not resize after you changed the sizing. Changes apply to new positions. Open ones keep what they were opened with.
- Your copying stopped and you did not stop it. Managers can remove a follower. That closes the copied positions and settles the fees, and your balance stays where it is.
- Fees show as charged but not collected. Two steps of the same fee.
- Your strategy is not on the leaderboard. Publishing the profile and listing on Markets are separate switches.
- An account will not appear in the create strategy wizard. Copy masters are Pro accounts only, and an account already acting as a master or an investor cannot take a second role.
Anything else, use the chat widget with the strategy name and the account number.