Copy Trading

Trade once on one account. Every other account you own follows — with the size you choose, and with guards that refuse to do the wrong thing when accounts don't match.

What this is — and isn't

✓ What it does

Mirrors your own trades across your own broker accounts. You nominate one account as the leader, trade on it normally, and your other accounts follow automatically.

✗ What it doesn't do

It is not a marketplace where you subscribe to a stranger's calls. You cannot follow another trader here. If that's what you're shopping for, this isn't the product.

It's built for people running more than one account: your own plus a family member's, an HUF, a partner's account, or the same strategy split across brokers for margin headroom or order rate limits. You place the trade once; every account moves together.

Setting it up

Connect your broker accounts, then open the Copier tab in the Terminal. Copying is organised in groups — each group is one leader and its followers:

+ Add group and name it (e.g. Main, Family).
Pick its leader account — the one you actually trade on.
Tick the accounts that should follow it, and give each a multiplier — a whole number, minimum 1.
Switch the group Live, turn on Enable copy trading (the master switch), and Save.

Several groups at once

Run as many groups as you need — Account1 → {2,3,4} and Account7 → {8,9} side by side, with Account6 in no group. Groups never interact: trading a leader reaches its own group only. An account holds one role across the whole book — leader, follower of exactly one group, or unassigned — and each group has its own Live switch, so you can pause one without touching the others. Every group gets a colour, drawn as a ring on its accounts (leader solid, follower dashed) so you can always see which group an account belongs to.

Why multipliers are whole numbers

A follower is ×1, ×2, ×3 — or switched off. There is no ×0.5 and no ×0.

Zero is refused deliberately. It doesn't mean "don't copy" — mathematically it means "hold nothing", which would tell the system to close everything on that account. To stop copying an account, untick it.

Multipliers scale in lots, not units. A ×2 follower on a 1-lot NIFTY trade gets exactly 2 lots — never an odd quantity the exchange rejects for not being a lot multiple.

Trading from your broker's app — "Leader trades from"

By default the copier only sees orders you place in FNOTrader. If you'd rather trade the leader account in Kite, or in any broker's own terminal or app, set the group's Leader trades from to Broker terminal too. FNOTrader then watches that account's order book and copies what it finds there as well.

What you did at the broker	What followers get
A market order (already filled when we see it)	A protected limit at your fill price plus your entry/exit buffer — never a bare market order.
A limit or stop order that is resting	The same resting order, scaled by their multiplier.
You modify that resting order	Their orders are re-priced / re-sized the same way.
You cancel it	Theirs are cancelled.
You close a position	Same exit rules as always: capped at what each follower holds, never a reverse position (see below).
Something you placed in FNOTrader itself	Copied once, by the ordinary path. The watcher recognises our own orders and leaves them alone.

What it will not do

It never replays history. Only orders placed after you switch the mode on are copied. Turning it on at 11:00 does not push the morning's trades onto anyone.

There is a small lag. The order book is read several times a second while the market is open (once a minute after hours, so an AMO is picked up too). Followers typically move within one to two seconds of you.

A basket placed in the broker's app is several orders to us. Each leg copies on its own; they are not grouped.

Orders placed while our service was restarting are not picked up. Position sync (below) is the net for that.

A Demo leader can't use this. A demo account has no broker book — its orders only ever come from this app.

The Copier tab shows a 📡 watching broker book chip on the group while this is active, with how long ago the book was last read and how many orders were copied today. If the broker refuses the read, the chip turns red and says so — nothing is copied until it recovers.

When you open a trade

Every enabled follower gets the same trade, scaled by its multiplier. Accounts fire in parallel, each through its own queue and its own rate limit — ten followers don't take ten times as long as one.

It works from everywhere you can trade: the order ticket, basket execution, option-chain quick-trade, the chart Buy/Sell buttons, the straddle table and Strategy Builder.

Oversized orders

If your order is larger than the exchange freeze limit, it's split into legal chunks automatically, per account. Nothing to configure.

Modify and cancel follow too

Re-price a working leader limit and the follower orders that came from the same click are re-priced; cancel it and theirs are cancelled. Only after the broker has accepted your change — and each follower order's live state is read from its own broker first: already filled or rejected → skipped with the status named; not in the book → refused; book unreadable → nothing is touched. Quantity is re-scaled from the leader's new lots through the multiplier. Every account's outcome is reported and logged.

When you close a trade

Followers close too — but only down to what they actually hold.

Follower's position	What happens
Same size as the leader	Closes fully
Smaller than the leader	Closes only what they have
Nothing at all	Skipped, with the reason shown
Can't be read right now	Skipped — never assumed to be empty

It doesn't matter how you close: the square-off button, a plain sell from the order ticket, or a strategy exit. If the order reduces your leader position, it's treated as an exit.

The reverse-position problem

This is the single most important thing to understand about any copy-trading system, and the place most of them get it wrong.

Suppose a follower account joined after you were already positioned. They never had the trade. When you close, a naive system copies the instruction — "sell 2 lots" — and because there's nothing to sell, it opens a brand new short on an account that was flat.

A close is never copied blind. The follower's actual holding is read first, and the order is capped to it — or skipped entirely.

Why this matters

An accidental reverse position isn't a small error. You wanted to be flat and you're now short — with the opposite exposure, fresh margin blocked, and nobody watching. On options, a surprise short has uncapped risk.

Automatic exits — stop-loss and rules

Copying isn't only for orders you click. When the platform exits a position for you, followers are exited too:

Stop-loss and target hits
Max-loss square-offs
Adjustment-rule exits and rolls
Trigger fires and re-entries
Strategy leg exits

All of it goes through the same guard — capped to what each follower holds, never opening a reverse.

Your own exit always goes first

The copying happens after your leader order is placed. Nothing about your followers — a slow account, an unreachable broker — can delay your own stop-loss by even a moment.

When an order doesn't fill

An order is priced against the market as it was when the order was sent. In a fast move, that price is already history by the time it reaches the exchange, and the order can sit there unfilled.

Turn on Limit-order chase in Default Order Attributes and the platform re-prices resting orders toward the current market, stepping more aggressively each attempt — on the leader and every follower. It runs on our servers, so it keeps working after you close the browser.

Stop-losses chase regardless

For an automatic stop, the chase runs whether or not you switch the setting on, and it's allowed to step much further. An unfilled stop-loss isn't a preference anyone holds.

And if the position turns out to be already closed, the resting order is cancelled rather than chased — otherwise it would eventually fill and open a reverse.

Order protection

No plain market order ever leaves the platform. Every order becomes a marketable limit priced a buffer through the touch — it fills like a market order, but caps freak-fill slippage.

Automatic stop-losses use separate, wider buffers, and they're deliberately asymmetric:

Closing	Buffer	Why
A long (selling out)	Wide	A miss is bad, but the downside is bounded — the premium can only fall to zero.
A short (buying back)	Widest	A short option's premium can multiply in seconds. A tight cap means no fill on the one leg with uncapped risk.

You can tune both in Default Order Attributes. They're never applied tighter than your ordinary exit buffer.

Position sync — the safety net

Some drift can never be caught by copying orders, because no order exists to copy:

Your broker's MIS auto square-off at 15:20
An RMS cutoff or margin call
You exited by hand in the broker's own app
A follower's leg was rejected for margin
A follower was added mid-session

None of those pass through the platform. The only way to detect them is to compare state — which is what Check follower positions does. It reads every account and shows you exactly what differs:

Instrument	Leader	Target	Follower	Action	Order	Why
NIFTY 24000 CE	−65	−65	0	open	SELL 65	missing — leader holds −65, follower holds none
BANKNIFTY 52000 PE	1225	1225	490	add	BUY 735	short by 735 — topping up to the 1225 target
CRUDEOILM 7600 CE	0	0	−10	close	BUY 10	leader no longer holds this — closing the follower's position

The diff is shown account by account. Nothing is placed until you confirm.

You can sync one account or all of them. Positions are re-read at the moment you confirm, so you never execute against a stale snapshot. Closing orders go out before opening ones, so freed margin is available and nothing sits reversed in between.

Direction flips are split

If a follower is long where the leader is short, the fix is two orders — close to flat, then open the other way — never one double-sized order straight through zero.

The status chips

Every account carries a live badge in the Copier tab, so you can see drift without going looking for it:

Chip	Meaning
LEADER	The account everything is measured against.
IN SYNC	Read successfully and matching. Hover to see how many instruments were checked.
3 OUT OF SYNC	Differs from the leader. Click it to review the diff.
NOT CHECKED	Couldn't be read, or isn't eligible. Hover for the reason.

An unread account never shows green

An account we failed to read has zero known differences — but that is not the same as matching. It shows NOT CHECKED, never IN SYNC.

Limits & requirements

Limit	Detail
Groups	Any number of leader → followers groups. An account is a leader, a follower of exactly one group, or unassigned — never two roles.
Your accounts only	Not social or marketplace copy trading.
Broker-terminal leaders	Real broker accounts only; copies about a second after the order appears on the book; never replays orders placed before the mode was switched on; at most 30 leader orders copied per minute.
Whole-number multipliers	×1 and up. No fractional sizing.
Demo copying	Free. Run the whole thing on paper accounts before risking money.
Real-account copying	Requires the Copy Trading add-on, plus QuikTrade for real execution.
Per-account enable	Each broker account must be individually enabled for trading. One that isn't is skipped and told to you.
Passive limit exits	If your exit default is a passive limit, sync exits may rest unfilled. The app says so on the row rather than overriding your setting.

The rule underneath all of it

When we can't see, we don't act

Every risky decision fails closed. Account unreadable → skip. No matching position → skip. Can't confirm → skip, and tell you why.

The one deliberate exception: if we can't read your leader's book we treat the order as an opening trade, because refusing to classify must never block a legitimate trade you asked for. The per-account cap still catches it downstream.

Copy trading lives in the QuikTrade Terminal → Copier tab. See also the Terminal guide.

FNOTrader publishes analysis, execution and automation software. This page is educational and is not investment advice, a buy/sell recommendation or a research report. Sukrisa Technologies LLP is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. Trading in derivatives involves substantial risk of loss.