Open any strategy ranking and you will find an equity curve that climbs for eighteen months at a gentle angle, then drops a third in one week. The page still shows a positive total return. The people who joined in month seventeen are down 33 per cent and the people who joined in month two are up. Same strategy, same broker, same trades, opposite experience. That gap is the thing AutoTrade cannot solve for you and the thing every follower has to price in before sending a single lot.
What AutoTrade actually is
Myfxbook began as an analytics site that reads a trading account and publishes what it finds. AutoTrade is the copying layer built on top of that. A strategy provider runs a live account, that account is connected to Myfxbook, and followers who hold accounts at a participating broker can subscribe so that new positions on the provider's account are mirrored onto theirs. The connection to your own account is not a manual export. It runs through the broker's integration, which is why the list of supported brokers matters more than any other detail.
If your broker has not integrated, AutoTrade is not available to you at that broker, full stop. There is no workaround with an investor password. That is a design choice rather than a limitation: routing copies through the broker rather than through a terminal on someone's laptop removes the single biggest source of failure in retail copy trading, which is a home PC losing its connection halfway through a trade. Terminal-side and server-side copiers, covered in trade copiers explained, take the opposite trade-off.
For the follower the service is free to use, and the commercial arrangement sits between Myfxbook and the brokers who participate. Read that carefully when you compare it to a paid signal subscription. Free to the follower does not mean free of cost; it means the cost is embedded somewhere in the trading conditions rather than charged on an invoice.
What "verified" proves and what it does not
A verified account on Myfxbook means the statistics were read from a live account at the named broker, using credentials the account owner supplied. Nobody typed the numbers in. That removes the most common form of signal-seller fraud, which is a screenshot of a demo account presented as live. The base layer of the platform is worth understanding on its own; we set it out in what is Myfxbook.
Here is what verification says nothing about. It does not say the account was funded with real money in a size that mattered to the person running it. It does not say the strategy has any edge beyond the sample you are looking at. It does not say the provider will keep trading the same way next month, and it does not say the provider has not run twelve other accounts that were quietly deleted when they blew up. Survivorship shapes every public ranking, and a leaderboard sorted by return will always be dominated by whoever took the most risk and got away with it.
Reading a provider page like an auditor
| What the page shows | What it tells you | How it misleads |
|---|---|---|
| Total gain | Compounded return since the account opened | Says nothing about the path. A curve that doubled and halved twice can print the same number as a straight line. |
| Maximum drawdown | Worst peak to trough fall recorded so far | It is the worst so far, not the worst possible. A young account has simply not met its bad month yet. |
| Average trade duration | Whether the system scalps or holds | An average hides the one position held for three weeks that carried all the loss. |
| Profit factor | Gross profit against gross loss | Grid and averaging systems flatter this metric right up to the point they break. See martingale danger. |
| Open positions | Current exposure and floating loss | A closed-trade history can look flawless while an enormous losing position sits open and unrealised. |
The single most useful habit is to ignore the headline return and look at the monthly table instead. Count the losing months. Look at what happened around known event risk, the kind of dates listed in the economic calendar guide. A strategy that has never seen a rate decision surprise has an untested risk profile no matter how smooth the line looks.
Why your results will differ
Copied trades are new orders on your account, sent after the provider's order is seen. That delay is small, and on a position held for two days it is irrelevant. On a scalping strategy that targets a handful of pips it can eat the entire expectancy, because your fill sits a fraction of a second later at a different price and your spread is whatever your account pays, not whatever the provider pays. The mechanics of that gap are covered in slippage explained.
Size scaling is the second divergence. Copying is proportional, so a provider risking a fixed fraction of a 200,000 unit account translates onto a 2,000 unit account through rounding that can push your real risk above or below theirs. Check the minimum lot step your broker allows and work out what the smallest copied trade will actually be.
Set your own maximum. Decide the loss that ends the subscription before you start it, then act on it without renegotiating. Copy trading concentrates someone else's risk appetite into your account, and leveraged trading carries a high risk of losing money.
When it is the right tool
AutoTrade suits someone who wants exposure to a rules-based system without building it, who already banks with a supported broker, and who is prepared to treat the allocation as speculative capital. It is a poor fit for anyone hoping to skip the work of understanding risk, and a poor fit for a scalping system where execution differences dominate. If your goal is to evaluate several providers rather than to copy one, read evaluate signal services first and apply the same tests before money moves.
"A verified track record tells you the trades happened. It tells you nothing about whether the person behind them was lucky, and luck has a long half-life in this business."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- AutoTrade copies through the broker's own integration, so it only works on accounts at brokers that have joined the programme.
- Verification confirms the trades were executed on a real account and nothing more about the quality of the strategy behind them.
- Read the monthly table and the open positions before the headline return, and treat a young account as untested.
- Spread, fill delay and lot rounding make your copied results diverge from the provider's, most severely on short-duration strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Myfxbook AutoTrade work with any broker?
No. Copying runs only on accounts held at brokers that have integrated with the service, and the list changes over time. If your broker is not on it, you either open an account with one that is or use a different copier that runs on your own terminal or server.
What does a verified track record on Myfxbook actually prove?
It proves the trades shown were executed on a real account at the broker named, because the data is pulled directly from that account rather than typed in. It does not prove the strategy is sound, that the account was funded meaningfully, or that the same behaviour will continue.
Will my results match the strategy provider's results?
Rarely exactly. Your spread, execution speed, account currency, leverage and lot scaling all differ from the provider's, and copied orders fill a moment later at whatever price is available. Expect a gap in both directions, and treat any copied strategy as high risk capital that can lose money.