A strategy
starts from a signal — an alert posted to a webhook — and fans it out to every subscribed account.
The copier
starts from an account. An order Tradeus places on the leader is copied to the followers, each sized for itself. Trades you place by hand are copied too, from a Tradovate, TradeLocker, Rithmic, MetaTrader 5 or Capital.com leader.
If your decisions come from a chart alert, use a strategy. If they come from you trading one account by hand, use the copier — on a leader whose broker copies hand trades. Nothing stops you running both, on different accounts.
Trades you take by hand
Whether a trade you place by hand on the leader is copied depends on the leader's broker, not on a setting in the group. Today: Tradovate, TradeLocker, Rithmic, MetaTrader 5 and Capital.com, yes. Alpaca is a no by design, because an Alpaca account holds what it buys. Orders Tradeus places from your alerts fan out on every broker. Where the leader's broker reports a position the moment it changes, a hand trade is copied straight away, with one exception: for six seconds after Tradeus places an order on the leader, a change there is read as that order's own fill, which the alert has already copied to each follower at its own size. A trade you place by hand inside those seconds is copied by the next comparison instead, at most about twenty-one seconds later. If you rely on hand trades, check the readiness panel before you trade rather than after — see Which brokers work.
The stop you set by hand, and where it travels
Setting a stop on your own order ticket is a different thing from Tradeus placing one, and the difference shows up on your followers. Tradeus reads the stop and target resting behind your position, copies them to every follower AT YOUR OWN PRICE LEVEL rather than at the same distance from each follower's fill, and keeps them there: move your stop mid-trade and the followers move with it, with no order placed anywhere. Every account then leaves the trade in the same move instead of a few ticks apart. It is switched on PER BROKER, and only after it has been proven on a real account there. Reading a resting stop and moving one are separate abilities, and a broker can have the first without the second. The event log says which you have, under Risk, naming the account, the instrument and the level: the stop was copied; or it was set but this broker cannot be asked whether it still rests there; or it was not copied, and why — this broker cannot move a resting stop, your follower trades a different instrument, or your own broker does not report the stop behind a position in the first place. A level Tradeus guessed would be worse than none, because it would look like protection. How fast you see it depends on the broker. Tradovate, Rithmic and MetaTrader 5 tell Tradeus the moment you move a stop — under a second — because the change arrives on a feed Tradeus is already listening to. Everywhere else it is found by the comparison that runs every fifteen seconds. Either way the log names the level you moved it to, not the one you left. It reaches a position that came from one of your alerts as well, and that needs one sentence of explanation, because an alert already put a stop there. The stop it put there is the price your alert named — on every account, yours included, since they all came from the same alert. So you and your followers start on the same level, and moving yours moves theirs by exactly the same amount. What Tradeus checks first is that this is really so: a follower whose stop is NOT where yours was is left alone, because dragging it would move that account by a different amount than you moved, and on a tight stop to the wrong side of its own entry. The same if its broker will not say where its stop is. Both cases leave a line in the log naming which of the two it was. Two things it will not do. It will not carry a level across instruments: an index future and an index CFD track the same market and do not print the same number, so where a follower trades your instrument under a different name the position is copied and the protection is not. And it will not drop a follower's stop on a single reading that yours is gone — a broker that has just reconnected reports an empty order book, which looks identical to you cancelling it, so a disappearance has to be seen twice before the followers follow you out of it. One broker cannot do that last part at all: Capital.com takes a stop level and publishes no way to clear one again, so if you cancel your own stop entirely, a Capital.com follower keeps the one Tradeus put there. That is more protection than you are holding rather than less, and the log says it in those words instead of reporting a removal that never happened. Two others have a limit worth knowing before you rely on them. On Alpaca a stop is an order of its own, and Tradeus will MOVE one that is already resting but will not place one where there is none — an Alpaca account holds what it buys, so a stop placed against the position would sell your own shares along with the part Tradeus opened, and the log says so rather than doing it. And on TradeLocker what your own broker publishes decides it: some deployments list the stop on their order rows and some do not, so Tradeus asks rather than assumes, and the readiness line tells you which kind yours is. Orders from your alerts are different again: there a stop and a target travel with the order to every follower whose broker can hold one, and the log names any account where it could not — see What an alert may contain. A
breakeven or update alert moves the followers' stops itself, each to its own entry on a breakeven — being proven on Tradovate and switched on per account, and not on other brokers yet; see Moving a stop by alert.