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.

28 Sept 2026 · 5 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 a trade copier works, in short

One account is the source account — the account whose trades you want repeated. The accounts that receive the copies are 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

Every order Trepeat places carries its own tag — a magic number on MetaTrader, an order label on cTrader. Every close the engine performs requires that tag to be present on the position. A position without it is not eligible to be closed at all, so a trade you opened yourself 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 an invariant in the engine, not a per-repeater option. There is no configuration in which Trepeat closes a position it did not open — the tag check lives in the single close primitive that every close path has to go through, so it cannot be bypassed by a setting, a filter, or a mistake in one screen.

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.

What that buys you in practice:

• Stop leaves everything open. Stopping a repeater stops new copies being made. It does not close anything by itself — neither its own positions nor yours. When copies are open, the confirmation additionally OFFERS to flatten them first; that is a separate choice you make, and declining it stops the repeater with every position left where it is. Either way your own trades are not in the group. See Running, Stopped and open positions.
• Flatten only reaches its own group. Flatten closes a source position and the repetitions made from it. A position you opened outside any repeater is not in that group, 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.
• The source account is the opposite case. A copier repeats whatever happens on the source, so a trade you place by hand there will be copied to the followers — that is the whole point of it. If you want certain instruments kept out, that is what the symbol allowlist is for.

Proportional copying when account sizes differ

The second question that comes with this one: if the accounts are different sizes, what lot does the follower actually get? 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.
• 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.

Whichever rule produced the number, two things happen to it before an order leaves. A per-order cap bounds it, so one unusually large source trade cannot scale a big follower past where you are comfortable. Then the figure 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. 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 scaled lot can land below the smallest order that symbol accepts. When it does, the copy is skipped and the reason recorded rather than rounded up to the minimum or sent as an order the broker would reject. 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 rounds to zero and 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.

Trepeat 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 flat monthly Plan from $29. If you came here unsure what this category is even called, see copier, duplicator, replicator: the same thing.