Copy Trading Between Your Own Prop Accounts: Where the Rules Draw the Line

[FXS Prop Desk]

Running two or three funded accounts with the same trade copier is common. Most firms allow it within their limits, but the fine print matters.

Usual rules:

• Maximum combined allocation per person (e.g. 300k or 400k total across accounts).
• Copying between your own accounts at the same firm is typically fine.
• Copying from another person or a signal service is usually banned and is detected by matching entries across unrelated accounts.
• Opposite positions across accounts (hedging between accounts) is almost always banned.

Technical side:

• Copier latency matters for scalping. A 300–800 ms delay can turn the second account into a noticeably worse fill.
• Lot rounding on different account sizes can make risk uneven. Check the calculated lots, not just the "multiplier".
• A breach on one account does not always stop the copier. Build a kill switch.

Do you use a local copier or a cloud-based one, and have you measured the fill difference between master and copy?

[Shadow Trader]

The rule that caught a friend of mine wasn't one of the obvious ones. His copier failed to close the follower after the master hit its stop, he went short on the master ten minutes later, and for twenty minutes he was long on one account and short on the other at the same firm.

Nobody intended a hedge, but the logs look exactly like one. Since then my copier checks that every follower is flat before the master can open the opposite direction, and it alerts if positions differ for more than 5 seconds.

A straight multiplier assumes both accounts are in the same state, and they rarely are. If the 100k is funded with 8% drawdown left and the 50k is in phase 2 with 3% left, the same proportional trade eats very different shares of each one's headroom.

So I size the follower from its own remaining daily loss, not from the master's lots. The copy often ends up smaller than the multiplier says, which I'm fine with.

For latency, I run a local copier on the same VPS as both terminals and log fill time and price on each side. Mine sits around 50 to 90 ms, and the gap only shows around releases. Have you compared a cloud copier on the same trades?