The settings page of a copier looks like a preferences screen and behaves like a risk mandate. These are the ones that change your equity curve, roughly in the order they matter.
Lot Sizing: Three Ways, Two of Them Sane
Fixed lots is the honest default. Every signal gets 0.05 lots, whatever the stop distance is. It is predictable and it is blunt: a signal with a 15 pip stop and one with a 90 pip stop risk six times different amounts on the same size.
Risk percentage fixes that by working backwards from the signal's own stop. Say your balance is 5,000.00 USD, you set 1% per trade, and the signal on EURUSD has a 25 pip stop. Risking 50.00 USD over 25 pips means 2.00 USD per pip, which is 0.20 lots. The same 1% on a 100 pip stop gives 0.05 lots. Every trade now costs you the same when it is wrong, which is the entire point.
The multiplier copies whatever size the provider posted, scaled. It is the weakest of the three, because a provider's 1.00 lot means nothing without knowing their account size, and if a signal has no size posted there is nothing to multiply. Use it only when you know the provider's account.
One caution on risk percentage: a signal with no stop cannot be sized this way. Either skip those or give the copier a fallback size, and understand that a trade with no stop and a fallback size is exactly the kind of position that ends an account. The wider argument is in risk management rules.
What to Do With Three Take Profits
Most channels post several targets. There are four sane treatments.
Split spreads the position across the targets, with weights you choose, so a three-target signal at 50/30/20 closes half at TP1. This is what most providers assume you are doing, and it is what makes their published results reproducible. First takes the whole position off at TP1: the highest hit rate, the smallest average win, and it never catches the trade the channel built its reputation on. Last aims everything at the furthest target and accepts that most trades will not get there. None leaves the trade with only a stop, for people who manage exits by hand.
Split has a practical floor. Splitting 0.03 lots across three targets means 0.01 each, and if your broker's minimum is 0.01 you are already at it. Below that, split silently degrades into something else, so check your size before assuming it works.
Break-Even and Trailing
Break-even after N targets moves the stop to the entry price once the first target, or the second, is filled. It converts a live risk into a free trade, and it also converts a number of eventual winners into scratches, because price returning to entry before running is ordinary behaviour rather than a rare accident. Set it after the first target if you sleep badly, after the second if you want the runner to survive.
Trailing does the same thing continuously, reassessed on a timer rather than tick by tick. On gold in a fast session, a tight trail is a fancy way of paying the spread to exit early. Give it room or leave it off.
The Two Guards Nobody Sets Until It Costs Them
A spread limit refuses the trade when the current spread is wider than your threshold. In the ninety seconds around a scheduled release, spreads on gold can go from 20 cents to several dollars, and a market order in there is a donation. A cap on open positions stops three channels firing on the same news from stacking four correlated longs onto one account. Both are one number each. Both save more money than any parser improvement.
Reverse copy exists on the settings page. It is not the joke it sounds like: some traders do run a channel inverted after tracking it for months. It is still a bet that a losing edge is stable and inverted, and the spread and swap are paid in either direction, so a channel that loses slowly does not become a channel that wins slowly.
A Sensible Starting Point
For a first month on a new channel: risk percentage at 0.5%, split targets, break-even after the first target, no trailing, a spread limit set at roughly double the instrument's normal spread, and a cap of three open positions. Run it small, compare your statement against the channel's published record at the end of the month, and change one setting at a time. If your results and theirs diverge badly, the answer is usually in the follow-up replies or the symbol mapping described in how a copier works, not in the sizing.
Leveraged trading carries a high risk of loss, and none of the above is advice on whether to trade a given signal. It is a description of what the settings do.
"Every argument about signal quality I have ever had with a client ended in the sizing tab. Same channel, same month, opposite conclusions."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Risk percentage sized off the signal's own stop makes every losing trade cost the same, which fixed lots cannot do across a 15 pip and a 90 pip stop.
- Split targets reproduce what most providers assume you are doing, but the split degrades once each slice hits your broker's minimum lot.
- Break-even after the first target converts risk into scratches as often as it saves you, so choose the trigger deliberately.
- A spread limit and a cap on open positions cost one number each and prevent the two most expensive copier accidents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which sizing method should a small account use?
Risk percentage, set low. On a 1,000.00 USD account, 0.5% is 5.00 USD of risk per trade, which on most signals produces the broker's minimum lot anyway. That tells you something useful: below a certain balance, the sizing rule stops having room to work.
Does copying with split targets match the channel's published results?
Closer than any other setting, because that is usually what the provider assumes when they publish. It still will not match exactly, because your entry price, spread and swap are your broker's, not theirs.
Should I use a trailing stop on every channel?
No. A trailing stop suits trend signals with wide targets and hurts scalping channels, where it exits on ordinary noise. Test it on one channel at a time.
What happens if the signal has no stop loss?
Risk percentage cannot compute a size without one. Either configure the copier to skip those signals or set a fallback fixed size, and treat any unstopped position as the largest risk on your account.