Copy trading and IB setups: the execution lag to be aware of

[FXS London Scalper]

Copy trading platforms let followers mirror a strategy provider's trades. For scalping strategies, the lag between the provider's entry and the follower's fill can destroy the edge.

Sources of lag:
- Signal transmission time from the provider's account to the copy service.
- Processing time at the copy service.
- Order routing to the follower's broker.
- Different brokers with different prices at the same moment.

For a swing trader, a 500 ms lag is irrelevant. For a scalper targeting 3 pips, it can mean entering 0.5–1 pip worse on average, and a fraction of trades not filling at all.

Things to check before following a scalping strategy:
- What's the average holding time? Under five minutes is risky for copiers.
- Does the provider's track record show their fills, or the followers' fills?
- Are followers' results published separately? They're often much worse.

For providers: if your strategy depends on precise entries, copying may not work for your followers, even if your own results are good.

Has anyone compared provider and follower results on a copy platform?

[Shadow Trader]

Does a copier delay matter if it is only 100 milliseconds? For a trade held for hours, no. For a 15 pip scalp on a one-minute chart, it depends on where the delay comes from, and that is often not where people look.

A few places it can sit. The copier software has to detect the master fill, which on some setups means polling the terminal on a timer instead of reacting to an event. Then the order travels to the second account, possibly on a different server in a different data center. Then the second broker executes at its own price with its own spread. Put a VPS in one region and a broker server in another, and the round trip changes again.

Is the slippage on the copy account always worse? Not necessarily, but it is biased. The master gets the price that triggered the decision. The follower gets whatever the market offers a moment later, and on a fast move that moment is exactly when price is leaving. On a quiet range, the follower may do just as well.

What about limit orders on the follower? Those can protect against bad fills but also skip the trades that moved fastest, which are often the winners. So the copy account can end up with a different distribution of results, not just a slightly smaller one.

The way to find out is to compare the same trades, entry by entry, across both accounts for a couple of weeks and look at the difference in fill price in pips, split by whether the market was fast or slow.

What copy setup has anyone found tight enough for scalping, and how was the delay measured?