Does Copy Trading Actually Work?

Mechanically: yes

The plumbing is mature and boring. A strategy account opens a position, the platform mirrors it into follower accounts proportionally within seconds, and closes mirror trades when the original closes. Brokers have run this for over a decade.

Two real frictions: slippage, where your fill differs slightly from the strategy's because you enter fractionally later, and proportional rounding on small accounts, where a tiny balance cannot take a proportional slice of a position. Both mean your results track the published record closely but never match it exactly. Anyone showing you identical numbers is showing you the strategy's account, not a follower's.

Financially: it depends on the thing nobody checks

Whether copying makes money depends almost entirely on the strategy you copy, and the record of that strategy is the one thing most people never verify before depositing.

What separates a checkable strategy from a story: a track record on a third-party platform that reads directly from the broker account; a trade-by-trade history rather than an equity curve alone; a maximum drawdown figure; and enough elapsed time to have survived more than one kind of market.

Why people lose money even with a working system

• They disconnect during a drawdown. Stopping mid-dip locks in the loss and forfeits the recovery. This is the single most common way to lose money on a profitable strategy.
• They over-leverage. A system with a 1% drawdown becomes a 24% drawdown at 24x. Same strategy, different survivability.
• They chase last month's leaderboard. Top-of-the-table strategies are frequently the ones taking the most risk, and the leaderboard is where they appear right before the risk shows up.
• They ignore costs. Spread and overnight swap are charged whether the month is profitable or not, and a high-frequency strategy pays them constantly.

What realistic looks like

Conservative automated strategies that survive years tend to produce something in the region of 0.5–2% a month, with losing months included, and drawdowns that occasionally take back several months of gains. That is what "working" looks like — unspectacular and slow.

Strategies advertising 10%+ monthly are not doing a better version of the same thing; they are taking materially more risk, and the risk arrives eventually. When you see that number, the correct response is to ask what the maximum drawdown is and how long the record runs.