Can You Copy Trades and Still Place Your Own?
You can trade by hand on an account that is also a follower. Here is the mechanism that makes that safe — and how proportional sizing works when the two accounts are different sizes.
Updated 14 Oct 2026 · 7 min read
Yes. You can trade by hand on an account that is also a follower, and a copier built properly will leave those trades completely alone. It is worth knowing exactly why, because the answer turns on how the copier identifies its own orders — not on a setting you have to remember to switch on.
How does a trade copier work?
A trade copier watches one account, the source account, and repeats each trade placed there onto your other accounts, the follower accounts. The copier holds a connection to both ends. When a position opens on the source it places a matching order on each follower, sized to that follower rather than copied at the same lot; when the source position closes, it closes the follower position it opened for it. Nothing else about the follower account is its business. The longer version is in what a trade copier is.
Why your manual trades stay untouched
A trade you place by hand stays untouched because every order Trepeat places carries its own tag — a magic number on MetaTrader, an order label on cTrader — and every close the engine makes on its own requires that tag to be present on the position. A position without it is not eligible for an automatic close, so a trade you opened yourself on a follower is never closed, never recorded as a copy, and never reconciled away to force the follower account to look identical to the source.
This is built into the engine, not a per-repeater option. Automatic closes only ever touch Trepeat's copies. Flatten — on one trade group, Flatten all, or Flatten and stop, each of which you press — closes the source trade and every copy of it, and the server refuses a request for anything else. Trades Trepeat isn't copying are never touched.
One case deserves naming, because the broker does something Trepeat cannot prevent. A netting account keeps one position per symbol. If a copy lands on a symbol you are already holding there, the broker does not open a second position — it merges the two into one. Your trade is not closed and nothing is reconciled away, but the position is now larger than the one you opened, and part of it belongs to the copy.
The rule above is what protects you next: when the source closes, that merged position carries no tag of its own, so Trepeat refuses to close it rather than closing your trade along with the copy. It tells you instead — once when the merge is about to happen, and again if a close is refused — and leaves the position for you to handle at your broker. A hedging account, or keeping one open position per symbol on a netting account, avoids the situation entirely. Netting vs hedging accounts has the detail.
What that buys you in practice:
- Stop closes nothing by itself. Stopping a repeater stops new copies being made. When positions are open, the confirmation offers Flatten and stop, which closes the source trades and every copy of them, or Stop, leave open, which leaves every position where it is. Trades Trepeat isn't copying are never touched. See Running, Stopped and open positions.
- Flatten only reaches trades it is copying. Flatten closes the source trade and every copy of it. A trade Trepeat isn't copying is never part of a Flatten, and that is checked on the server before the request is accepted — not only in the interface.
- No reconciliation sweep. Some tools periodically force a follower to match the source exactly, which closes anything extra. Trepeat has no such sweep, so an extra position of your own is not a discrepancy it wants to correct.
Trading by hand on the source account
A trade you place by hand on the source account is copied to the followers, because the source is the account being repeated. The source account is the opposite case to a follower: a copier repeats whatever happens there, whether you placed the trade in the terminal or an Expert Advisor on that account did — that is the whole point of it. If you want certain instruments kept out, that is what the symbol allowlist is for.
Three things placed by hand on the source are not repeated as you placed them:
- A pending order. A limit or stop order resting on the source places nothing on the followers. When it fills, that fill is copied as a market order at that moment.
- A position opened before you pressed Run. Only trades opened while the repeater is Running are copied.
- A stop loss or take profit. Neither is placed on the follower. The next section says what happens instead.
Stop loss and take profit on a copy
Trepeat does not place a stop loss or a take profit on a follower copy, and it does not change one you set yourself. A copy opens with neither. It closes when the source position closes, whether you closed that by hand or its own stop loss or take profit was hit, at the follower broker's market price.
If you add a stop to a copy in the follower's terminal and it triggers, the broker closes that copy and the source position stays open. One limit follows from the copy holding no stop of its own: a source stop that triggers while Trepeat's engine is not running leaves the copy open, and an alert tells you to close it yourself. How Trepeat works sets out what is and is not copied.
Closing a copied trade by hand
You can close a copy yourself in the follower's terminal at any time, and Trepeat does not reopen it. Every copy it places answers a fill on the source account, so a position you closed is not put back. The Trades page marks it Manual close, apart from a close that came from the source and one made with Flatten.
The source position is not affected. Trepeat closes a source position only when you press Flatten. The three kinds of close are listed in trades and positions.
Proportional copying when account sizes differ
When the two accounts are different sizes, the follower lot is worked out from the source lot, not copied as it is: by the ratio of the two accounts' equity, or by a fixed multiplier you set. Copying 1.0 lot straight onto an account a quarter of the size would over-expose it, so the size is derived rather than duplicated. Two rules do that work:
- Equity ratio — the follower order is sized from the ratio of the two account equities: follower lot = source lot × (follower equity ÷ source equity). Accounts of any size stay proportional to each other under one rule, with no per-account tuning. If the two brokers define a lot differently, the lot is converted; if the accounts use different deposit currencies, equity ratio falls back to the multiplier.
- Fixed multiplier — the follower trades the source lot times a constant you set, the same on every follower regardless of its balance. Predictable, but it ignores account size.
| Source: 1.0 lot at $20,000 equity | Follower equity | Equity ratio | Fixed 0.25× |
|---|---|---|---|
| Follower A | $60,000 | 3.00 | 0.25 |
| Follower B | $20,000 | 1.00 | 0.25 |
| Follower C | $5,000 | 0.25 | 0.25 |
Whichever rule produced the number, it is adjusted before an order leaves. First it is snapped to the volume step the follower broker reports for that specific symbol — not to a universal 0.01, and not to whole lots. Then a per-order cap bounds it, so one unusually large source trade cannot scale a big follower past where you are comfortable, and the broker's own per-order maximum applies after that. The arithmetic behind each rule is in position sizing when copying trades, and you can run your own numbers on the lot size calculator.
When a proportional copy is skipped
A proportional copy is skipped when the scaled lot, after rounding, is below the smallest order the follower's broker accepts for that symbol. With Floor rounding (the default), a lot that scales to less than one step rounds down to nothing, and the copy is skipped and the reason recorded rather than sent as an order the broker would reject; Round or Ceiling can round it up to the minimum instead. Seeing that a copy did not happen, and why, is more useful than a list that only shows successes — a list of successes alone would be quietly wrong about your exposure.
The edge this bites hardest is the one people do not expect: index CFDs commonly step in 1.0 lots where FX majors step in 0.01. Scale a small index position down to a smaller follower and you can arrive at 0.4 lots on a symbol whose step is 1.0 — which Floor rounds down to zero, so the copy is skipped. The same repeater copying EURUSD between the same two accounts has no such problem. If a follower is far smaller than the source, check the steps on the instruments you actually trade before assuming the copier is broken; the other usual suspects are in why a trade copier is not copying.
Where Trepeat fits
Trepeat is a cloud trade copier connecting MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and cTrader, in any direction between them. Sizing is set per repeater — equity ratio or fixed multiplier, with a per-order cap and rounding you choose — and every order it places carries the tag that makes the rest of this page true. Trading by hand on the same follower account is a supported way to use it, not something to work around. The steps from two connected accounts to a first copied trade are in your first repeater.
Trepeat currently connects demo accounts only: evaluation and funded accounts are supported on either platform — MetaTrader demo servers, or a cTrader demo account where the firm issues one — subject to that programme's own rules, and a live real-capital account is refused at connection. There is no VPS to rent, no money moves through Trepeat, and the charge is a subscription of $15 per account per month. If you came here unsure what this category is even called, see copier, duplicator, replicator: the same thing.