Why the follower's result is not the provider's

A strategy card shows what the provider's account did. The follower's account is a different account, opened by the platform a little later, on a different balance, with fees on top. cTrader says so itself. This page lists, from the help pages read on 6 November 2026, the places where the two results can part.

What the platform says about prices

The cTrader page on copying answers the question about risk with three sentences: strategy performance can decline, markets can be volatile, and "provider and investor prices may differ because of trading conditions and execution time". The third sentence is the one this page is about. A trade is opened on one account first and then repeated on another. Between the two events time passes, and the price of the instrument can move or the available liquidity can change.

No figure follows the sentence. The pages this site read do not say how often prices differ or by how much, and this site does not supply a number.

What the help pages say about differences, quoted

Each row is a sentence or condition from the cTrader help pages, read on 6 November 2026. The right column says what this site did not find.

The start of copying is a special case

When you start copying, the provider usually has positions open already. The help page says the platform will attempt to open new positions to match them. Each of those positions started at the provider's price at the time it was opened, and the follower's matching one starts at the price of the day the follower joins. From then on the follower's position and the provider's one are the same trade with a different entry. A strategy's printed return says nothing about the follower's entries.

The balances are different, and the ratio is recalculated

The copy ratio is equity against equity. The help pages explain that when the investor adds or removes funds the positions are recalculated, and that when the provider adds or withdraws funds the investor's positions are decreased or increased. Both mean that the follower's size is not fixed at the moment of copying. It moves with two balances, and only one of them belongs to the follower.

Leverage can differ between the two accounts

The help page puts this warning in a note: if the follower's account leverage is lower than the provider's, margin may not be sufficient to copy all the trades of the strategy, and the follower may reach stop out earlier than the provider. A stop out is the broker closing positions because the account no longer has enough margin to hold them. The provider's own account may be safe at the same moment.

Fees are taken from the follower, not from the provider's record

Fees paid to the provider come out of the investor's copy-trading account. The help pages describe three types, and the next page of this site sets out their printed caps. The help page defines the strategy's return as the return generated "in relation to the account balance the strategy had at the beginning of the period", that is the return of the provider's account. Fees a follower pays are not part of it, so the same trades leave the follower with a smaller figure than the provider's, even if every price were identical.

What an equity stop loss can and cannot do

The follower can set an equity stop loss. When equity drops below the chosen level, copying stops and the copied positions are closed. The help page warns that this is not a guaranteed stop-out price and that final equity may be lower than the level because of volatility, price gaps, liquidity or technical factors. The brake exists, and the page itself says it can slip.

What this site did not measure

To measure the gap one would need the follower's fills and the provider's fills for the same trades. Those are inside accounts and are not on public pages. This site read none of them and publishes no estimate of the gap.