What is copy trading?

Type 1 — social copy trading. A platform connects your account to a “leader”: every trade the leader takes appears in your account automatically. You are outsourcing the decisions. The edge you are betting on belongs to someone whose risk management you cannot see, and the platform takes its cut either way.

Type 2 — the account copier. Software that mirrors trades between terminals you own: live account to prop account, broker A to broker B. Every order is still yours. The weak points are plumbing: both terminals alive, one-hop delay on every copy, and prop firm rules about identical trades across firms.

Type 3 — the alert bridge. The source is your own strategy (a TradingView alert, a Pine script, an indicator), and the bridge copies your signal into your MT5 account as an order. The strategy is yours, the account is yours, and the copier only does the typing. This is the category SignalForge lives in.

Social: leader drawdowns arrive in your account in full; leaders risk other people’s money differently than their own; past performance is the classic trap. Account copiers: double positions when you forget a mirror is on, partial fills that desynchronize accounts, and prop firms that ban identical trades across companies. Alert bridges: symbol mismatches between chart and broker, sizing that ignores contract sizes, and alerts that fire while the terminal is down. None of these are exotic — each has a checklist fix, and we maintain them in our guides.

On MT5 the practical route is the alert bridge: your strategy lives in TradingView, each alert carries a small JSON payload (symbol, action, lot, stop, target), the webhook reaches the bridge, and the EA inside your MT5 places the order at your broker. Median time from webhook to confirmed order in our 19-23 September 2026 measurements was about 0.5 s. The walkthrough: how to copy TradingView signals into MT5, and the base setup in connect TradingView to MT5. For the legality picture: is copy trading legal.