Two accounts, one trade copier, and a hidden delay

[Fairman]

Two accounts, one trade copier, and a hidden delay

Copying trades from a master account to follower accounts is common among traders who run several accounts. The copier adds delay, and the delay is rarely measured.

Typical copier lag is somewhere between 50 and 500 milliseconds, depending on setup and server location. On a swing trade that is nothing. On a two-pip scalp it can be the whole edge.

A subtle issue is price drift between the master fill and the follower fill. If the master gets in at 1.0850 and the follower arrives half a second later at 1.0852, the follower is already two tenths behind. On the way out, the same thing happens in reverse, because the close signal also travels.

An informal test: open and close a few dozen small trades through the copier and compare timestamps and prices across accounts. The numbers tell the whole story.

Running the copier on a VPS near the broker's servers usually helps, as does using the broker's native copy tools when available, since those skip the extra hop.

How much lag was measured between master and follower accounts, and did it change at different times of the day?