The trade copier that always arrived late

[Shadow Trader]

A trader runs a strategy on a master account and mirrors it to two follower accounts at different brokers using a copier tool. On paper, all three should produce nearly identical results. After a month, the followers are down relative to the master, and the gap is bigger than the commissions can explain.

Digging into the logs tells the story. The copier takes about 150 to 300 milliseconds to relay each trade. On slow markets, that's nothing. On fast ones, the followers are filling a few tenths of a pip worse on entry, and the exits are mistimed by the same margin.

Worse, the closing logic is the weak point. When the master closes at a profit, the market has already moved by the time the follower closes. Profits shrink, and losses grow.

Then there's the broker mismatch. The follower broker has a wider spread, different execution and a different server location. Everything adds up.

Eventually the pattern becomes clear. The strategy has an edge measured in fractions of a pip, and every extra hundred milliseconds eats a piece.

The fix isn't glamorous. Run the copier from a VPS near the follower broker's server, use the same account type everywhere, and accept that copied results will always trail the master by some amount. Measure that amount instead of assuming it's zero.

How much have copied results trailed the master account, and was the cause ever fully tracked down?