Copy Trading Statistics: Is Copy Trading Profitable When Every Strategy Is Counted?

Ask whether copy trading is profitable and you will be shown a chart. It is always one chart - a leader with a smooth line, a high win rate and a few hundred followers - and it answers a different question from the one you asked. One strategy's chart tells you how that strategy did. It tells you nothing about the odds facing someone who opens the list and picks.

The honest unit is the whole list. So that is what we read. Every day, our system records every strategy RoboForex lists on its CopyFX copy-trading service - the all-time return, the worst fall, the balance, the follower count, the commission, the registration date - and keeps the record even after a strategy leaves the list. The rating we publish is scored from that record; the copy trading statistics below are the same record summed across everything on it. The figures are the platform's own, per account; the sums and shares are ours, and they describe the list as it stood on 11 September 2026.

The one-line answer: a little over a third of listed strategies are underwater, the middle strategy is barely above zero, and the followers' money sits on a few dozen strategies that do better than the average and fall harder than it.

Why one chart cannot answer the question

Three mechanisms sit between a leader's chart and a follower's result, and they hold whatever the numbers say in a given month.

The first is the list itself. A strategy whose return reaches minus 90% and stays there for ten days leaves the public rating, name and record with it. What you browse is what survived that rule, so any average taken from the list is an average of survivors. Our panel keeps the departed, which is the only reason the churn section below can exist at all.

The second is the counter. The headline figure on a strategy is its return since registration. That makes a strategy three years old and a strategy three weeks old read on the same scale, and it resets to zero the moment a trader opens a new account. It also says nothing about when a follower joined: a follower who arrived at the peak of a strategy that later gave everything back has a very different result from the counter on the card.

The third is the gap between the leader and the follower. The card measures the trader's account; it does not measure the people copying it, who join late, size differently and leave early. On Bybit, where the platform publishes what followers earned, we summed it and found the copying money net negative even while most leaders showed a profit. CopyFX publishes no such figure, so everything here is about the strategies. Read it as the ceiling of what following could return, not the floor.

Where every listed strategy stands

On 11 September 2026 the list held 5,202 strategies. This is where they stood by all-time return, with the share of follower seats sitting on each group beneath:

• 1,904 strategies, 36.6%, were underwater - an all-time return below zero.
• 716, 13.8%, had lost half or more. 155 of them, 3.0%, read minus 90% or worse and were still listed - inside the ten days the delisting rule allows.
• The median strategy stood at +6.5%. The single largest group, one strategy in four, sat between zero and plus 20%.
• The right tail is real and thin. 825 strategies, 15.9%, showed a return of at least +100%; 86, 1.7%, at least +1,000%.

Behind the return sits the fall it took to get there. The platform reports each strategy's worst single step - one bad stretch, not the full peak-to-trough decline - and even on that lenient measure the median listed strategy had lost 33.8% at some point; 1,841 strategies, 35.4%, had a worst step of half or more. Only 1,498, 28.8%, had never stepped down by more than 15%, and 981 of those were also in profit. That last group - less than one strategy in five - is what a careful follower is actually looking for.

Where the followers' money sits

The list carried 33,347 follower seats - one seat being one open copy relationship - and they are not spread across it. 2,762 strategies, 53.1%, had no follower at all. The 340 strategies with twenty or more followers held 71.5% of all seats; the 63 with a hundred or more held 38.3%.

The crowd, it turns out, is decent at avoiding losers. Among the 340 followed strategies, 22.9% were underwater against 37.6% of the rest; 1.8% were wiped against 3.1%; the median return was +54.1% against +5.3%. Whatever people look at when they pick, it does better than random.

It is bad at avoiding volatility. The same followed group had a deeper median worst step, 40.1% against 32.9%, and a larger share that had halved at some point, 41.8% against 34.9%. The pattern that draws followers - a high return, a smooth line, a win rate that comes from holding losers open - is also the pattern that falls hardest when it fails.

So the seats sit where you would expect. 19.7% of them were on strategies underwater; 8.5% on strategies that had lost half or more; 1.5% on strategies already wiped. And 34.2% - more than a third of all follower seats - were on strategies whose worst recorded step was 50% or deeper. Only 18.7% sat on a strategy that had never fallen more than 15%.

Age does not clean the pool

The natural defence is to follow only strategies with a long record. Here is what the record looks like by age:

Read left to right, the median return climbs as strategies age - +1.6% under thirty days, +4.3% at one to three months, +11.9%, +17.4%, +19.5% between one and two years - and then falls to zero for strategies older than two years. The share underwater does not fall at all: 37% of the youngest strategies, 31 to 34% through the middle, and 46% of strategies older than two years, the worst of any group. One in five of the oldest strategies had lost half or more.

The wiped share tells you why. 8.9% of strategies under thirty days old already read minus 90% or worse; among strategies older than two years, 0.5%. Blow-ups happen early and the rule removes them, so the old strategies you can see are the ones that neither died nor, as a group, did much. A long record proves survival. It does not prove skill, and on this list it comes with a coin-flip chance of being underwater.

The list is also young. 942 listed strategies, 18.1%, had been registered within the previous thirty days; 1,773, a third, within ninety.

The list turns over in weeks

Seventeen days of daily readings, 25 August to 11 September, were enough to watch the list churn:

Of the 6,342 strategies our panel saw in that window, 1,140 had left the list by the end of it. At the last reading before they went, 68.2% were underwater, 48.3% had lost half or more, and 33.4% read minus 90% or worse - the delisting rule doing its work. But 24.0% left in profit: a trader who closed the account or withdrew looks, from outside, exactly like one who lost it, and only the last card tells them apart. Between them the departed carried 5,964 seats at last sight, and 331 still had followers when they went.

In the same seventeen days 1,365 new strategies arrived. 385 of them, 28.2%, were already gone again by 11 September, and of the 980 still listed, 92 already read minus 90% or worse.

Some of the new arrivals were not new traders. The platform groups accounts by operator, and 814 of the strategies registered since 1 August carried that grouping. 167 of them - one in five - belonged to an operator whose older account had already lost half its value, or taken a single fall of 90% or more. 157 of the 167 used the same name as the account before, and together they carried 2,083 follower seats. A fresh account starts its all-time counter at zero, and nothing on the card says there was a previous one.

Two names show the shape without needing a verdict. An account named SARUJA, registered in February, was last on the list on 2 September, reading minus 2.9% all-time beside a worst step of minus 99.2%, with 2,559 followers; a newer account under the same name and the same operator id, registered on 21 August, carried 1,557 followers by 11 September. The full family of Saruja accounts is its own story. Smaller and faster: an account named SPT, registered on 24 August, was last seen on 1 September at minus 98.6%; a newer SPT under the same operator id, registered on 8 September, had 329 followers three days later. Renames work the same way, and our panel has recorded 116 of them so far, 90 among the strategies still listed.

Commission buys nothing visible

The trader sets the share of profit a follower pays, and the median on the list is 25%. Strategies charging 30% or more held 54.7% of all follower seats, so most of the copying money is on the more expensive half. Across the tiers the outcomes barely move: the share underwater runs from 34.0% at 20 to 29% commission to 40.9% at both ends, the median return from +1.9% for free strategies to +9.3% at 10 to 29%, then down to +4.0% at 40 to 50%. Nothing here says a higher fee buys a better strategy. A follower pays the commission on top of whatever the numbers above deliver.

So, is copy trading profitable?

At the level of the list, the answer is narrower than either the marketing or the warnings suggest. The middle listed strategy is slightly positive. A third are losing. A sixth have doubled or better. The followers are, on average, sitting on the better sixth - and on the deeper falls that come with it, most of which are not visible on the card because the platform's drawdown figure is a single step, not the full decline.

Whether a particular follower ends up in profit is then decided by four things the list does not show: which strategy, when they joined relative to its peak, how much of their money one strategy gets, and how many strategies they hold at once. Those are the follower's decisions, and they are the whole game. The balances behind the list are small - the median strategy ran $293 of the trader's own money, and 811 ran under $100 - which is worth knowing when a leader's chart is offered as proof of conviction. A cent account is the cheap way to find out how any of this feels with your own money before it matters.

We will re-run the same computation as the panel grows, and a longer record will turn the seventeen-day churn into a real survival curve. The mechanisms will not have changed: the list you browse is filtered by a rule, the counter on the card resets with the account, and the card measures the trader, not you.

Every figure above is our own sum across the platform's per-account figures as recorded by our panel on 11 September 2026; the panel has read the full list daily since 25 August 2026, and the computation is repeatable. Shares and counts are dated and will move with every reading; the mechanisms - survivorship, the all-time counter, the gap between leader and follower - are properties of how the list works. Copy trading carries real risk, and nothing above predicts future performance.