Does Copy Trading Work? The Same Question Measured on a Forex and a Crypto Platform

Ask whether copy trading works and you will be shown a chart. It is one leader's chart, chosen because it goes up, and it answers a question nobody asked. Whether copy trading works is not a question about the leader. It is a question about the person who pressed the button - on the day they pressed it, for as long as they held on, after the fee.

That version of the question can be measured, and we measured it on two platforms that sit on opposite sides of the market. On the forex side, RoboForex's copy-trading service, where the rating we publish is scored from a panel that records every listed strategy daily, and where every strategy's full curve is public: we took every strategy that has a follower, cut its curve into every ninety-day copy that could have started on any day, and charged the trader's fee on each the way the platform charges it. On the crypto side, Bybit, which publishes for each leader what the people copying them collectively made: we read that figure for every leader with a follower and added it up. Both platforms were read on 11 October 2026; the article was first published on the readings of 12 and 13 September, and where a figure has moved since, both are given.

The one-line answer: on both platforms a little over half of the followed leaders were up over the last ninety days, the middle one made about nothing, and the followers' results ran behind the leaders' - by the fee, by when they joined, and by the leaders who fell out of the list before the reading.

What "work" has to mean

Three things stand between a leader's chart and a follower's balance, and they are the same on both platforms.

The first is the entry. The card shows the leader's return since the account opened. A follower who joins in month eighteen of that curve does not receive months one to seventeen; they receive whatever the curve does after their entry, and people tend to enter after the part that looked good. The second is the fee. On the forex platform the trader takes a share of the follower's profit at every settlement - weekly, on nearly nine strategies in ten - and a fee charged on the way up is not refunded on the way down, so a follower can pay it and still finish behind. The third is the list. Both platforms remove accounts - on the forex side once the yield has sat at minus 90% for ten days - so what a reader browses is what survived, and an average taken from survivors flatters.

Ninety days is the horizon used throughout because it is the one Bybit reports: its board publishes no window longer than that. On the forex side the card shows an all-time counter, so the ninety-day figures there are ours, cut from the daily curve. Where an account is younger than ninety days, both sides show its whole life.

Forex: what a ninety-day copy returned

On 11 October 2026 the RoboForex list held 5,001 strategies, of which 2,388 had at least one follower, holding 33,472 follower seats between them. That is the universe: a strategy nobody copies has no follower whose result could be asked about. Our panel adds 1,006 more that had followers when we last saw them and have since left the list - nearly three times the 371 it held when this article was first written, four weeks of readings later. The platform keeps serving their curves, 1,000 of the 1,006, so they can be counted, and they matter for the reason the previous section gave.

The last ninety days, strategy by strategy. Of the 2,377 followed strategies with a curve, 56.6% were up over their last ninety days - or their whole life, where shorter - and 61.5% of the seats sat on those; the median strategy made +2.2%. Restricting to the 1,721 with a full ninety days of history, 54.3% were up, 7.1% did not move at all, and 38.6% were down. After the trader's fee, 50.0% left a follower who had held the whole window in profit, and the seats on those were 52.5% of the seats with a full window.

Add the 1,000 departed and the picture darkens as it should: only 18.5% of them were up over their final ninety days - or their whole life, where shorter - 415 had lost 90% or more, and the median had lost 72.0%. Listed and departed together, 45.3% of followed strategies were up over their last ninety days, with 49.9% of the seats on them. In September, with a third as many departed on record, those two figures read 51.3% and 57.6%.

Every day a copy could have started. The last ninety days are one draw. The curves allow every draw: for each of the 2,127 strategies with a full window, listed plus departed, every day from the first point to ninety days before the last is an entry day, which gives 851,909 ninety-day copies. Each is settled with the strategy's own fee under the platform's rule - charged at each settlement period counted from the entry day, only on profit above its previous high, and once more at the exit.

Weighted by follower seats, so that a strategy with 800 followers counts 800 times a strategy with one, 69.7% of those copies ended above zero before the fee and 67.1% after it; 6.9% lost half or more; 2.9% did not move because the account was idle; the median copy made +6.2% after the fee. Give every strategy the same weight instead and the share in profit drops to 57.4% - the seats sit disproportionately on the strategies whose windows were good. 60.7% of strategies had most of their windows in profit; 165 never had a single one; 235 had every one in profit.

The fee's mark is visible in the shape. It moves copies from the right tail toward the "0 to 10" column, which grows from 20.1% to 24.8%, and it moves 20,270 copies - 2.4% of all of them - from above zero to below it. Those are windows in which the fee was charged on a high the curve then gave back. 1,250 strategies had at least one.

Two cautions. The windows overlap - neighbouring entry days share most of their path - so 851,909 is not a count of independent trials, and the per-strategy shares are the honest units. And the departed only reach back to 25 August, when the panel began; strategies that blew up before then are in no curve here, so every figure in this section is, to a degree we cannot yet measure, an average of survivors. On the 406 departed with a full window, only 40.6% had most windows in profit and one seat-weighted copy in five, 20.9%, lost half or more. A list that turns over in weeks needs months of readings before a survival curve can be drawn, and when this article first ran it said the numbers above would come down as the departed set filled. They have: with 371 departed on record the seat-weighted share of copies in profit after the fee was 69.3%; with 1,006 it is 67.1%, and it will keep moving in that direction.

When the follower joined. The simulation can ask what a real follower does, which is to join after the chart has looked good. Sorting entry days by what the same curve had done in the previous ninety days, on the listed strategies, window by window: after a quarter of +20% or more, 68.8% of the next ninety days ended in profit after the fee; after a modest quarter, 69.5%; after a losing quarter, 49.0%; after a quarter in which the curve did not move, 10.2% - because 82.8% of those accounts stayed idle. Joining on a day when the curve stood at a new high ended in profit 67.7% of the time.

So chasing a strong chart did not lower a follower's odds of a positive quarter on this list. It raised the size of the bad ones: 4.1% of copies started after a strong quarter lost half or more, against 1.8% after a modest one, and with the departed included and the seats weighted, 15.4% of copies started after a strong quarter lost half or more in the next one, against 4.2% after a modest one. Much of that tail is one strategy. An account named SARUJA AI carried 2,559 seats when we last saw it on 2 September; two-thirds of its ninety-day windows had ended in profit, the median at +193%, and the last one ended at minus 99%. What happened to it is its own story.

What moved the odds on this list. The same cuts we apply to the crypto board below point the same way here. Strategies with a hundred or more seats had most of their windows in profit 83.6% of the time, against 59.7% for those with one to four seats. A worst step of 50% or more - on the platform's own measure, which is a single move and flatters - went with 7.2% of seat-weighted copies losing half, against 0.1% where the worst step had stayed under 15%. And age did nothing: strategies older than two years had the lowest share with most windows in profit, 60.4%, and by far the most idle ones.

The card is not the copy. Of the 1,721 listed strategies with a full window, 1,155 showed a positive all-time return on the card. For 184 of them, carrying 2,150 seats, no more than half of the ninety-day copies had ended in profit after the fee; for 413, carrying 7,649 seats, the last one had not. The reverse happens too: 155 strategies with a negative card had most of their windows in profit. The card and the copy agree in rank - Spearman 0.59 - and disagree on about one strategy in five.

Crypto: what the copiers actually made

Bybit's board answers the follower's question directly, which is why it makes the other half of this piece. For every leader it publishes the collective profit of the people copying them over the trailing ninety days. On 11 October 2026 the board listed 7,024 leaders; 1,802 had at least one follower, holding 17,648 seats. Our rating of that board is scored from the same fields; here they are summed.

The leaders. 982 of the 1,802, 54.5%, showed a positive ninety-day ROI, and 69.0% of the seats sat on them; 798 were down; the median was +1.9%. 588 leaders, 32.6%, had a drawdown of 50% or more inside the window, with 21.6% of the seats on them. The board's ROI is the leader's own account over the leader's own equity, the same kind of figure as the forex curve, and it came out in the same place: half up, the middle one flat.

The followers. Where the forex platform is silent, Bybit's field speaks, with two caveats. For 373 of the 1,802 leaders it serves an exact zero, including visibly active accounts, and we have watched it flip from a real negative to zero between readings, so those are counted as no reading rather than break-even; and whether the figure is before or after the leader's share the platform does not say. Among the 1,429 leaders with a reading, the followers' pool was in profit for 652 - 45.6% - and in loss for 777. By seats, 58.2% of the seats with a reading sat on a pool in profit and 41.8% on a pool in loss. The median pool was minus three dollars. Summed, the pools came to minus $1.55 million: $1.37 million on the winning side against $2.92 million on the losing side, with the ten best leaders holding half of all the winnings and the ten worst carrying 47.9% of all the losses. On 12 September the same sum read minus $1.88 million, and two leaders held half of the winnings between them. When we first summed this board the judged set of 749 leaders read minus $1.46 million; over the whole board, followed or not, the 11 October total is minus $2.04 million.

The gap, measured. Cross the two fields and the gap between the chart and the copy has a size. Of the 830 leaders who were up and whose followers had a reading, the followers' pool was in loss for 244 - 29.4% - and those 244 leaders carried 2,618 seats, about one seat in seven on the board. The median leader in that group was up 27.7% with a drawdown of 25.8%, against 13.0% where leader and followers were both up. Followers who joined late, on a chart that had already climbed, and held through the fall, are the plausible mechanism; the platform does not publish entry dates, so the arithmetic is the closest thing to seeing it. The opposite corner exists too - 66 leaders down while their followers were up - and it is about a quarter the size.

What moved the odds on this board, among leaders with a reading. Drawdown first: where the leader's worst fall stayed under 15%, the followers' pool was in profit 67.7% of the time; where it reached 50%, 16.5%, and that group alone lost $2.17 million, more than the board's whole net. The crowd second: the 30 leaders with a hundred or more followers had their pools in profit 66.7% of the time and were the only group whose pools summed to a plus, +$259,000, while leaders with one to four followers were in profit 43.8% of the time and lost $660,000 between them. Age, nothing: leaders older than two years had the lowest share of pools in profit of any age group, 42.6%. And the win rate is the cut that reads differently from one month to the next. Leaders with a win rate of 90% or more had the highest share of leaders up, 85.6%, and the highest share of pools in profit of any win-rate group, 70.0%, and on this reading their pools summed to a plus, +$168,000. On the September reading the same band had carried the most negative total of any win-rate group, minus $994,000, because the pattern that produces a 97% win rate also produces the occasional fall that takes everything with it. A month later the fall has left the window and the band looks like the safest place on the board. That is what occasional means.

The same questions, side by side

At the leader level the two markets are the same place: a bit over half up, the seats more than that, the median near zero. The follower row is the one that moves. On the readings this article was first published on, the simulated forex follower sat ten points ahead of the measured crypto one, 57.7% of seats in profit against 47.3%; four weeks later the two have swapped sides, 52.5% against 58.2%. Neither reading says that one market works and the other does not. The forex figure is a simulated follower who held exactly ninety days on a strategy that is still listed today - add the departed with a full window and it reads 45.0% - and it cannot see a real follower's late entry, early exit or sizing. The crypto figure is money the platform measured, with every late entry and every panic exit in it, and it moved eleven points in a month largely because a handful of large pools turned - which is also why ten leaders now hold half the winnings where two did in September. Put the two side by side and the honest reading is that a follower's share over one quarter moved five points on one platform and eleven on the other between two readings a month apart, and that the measured one is the one you would be.

What does differ between the markets is the fee and the fall. The forex seat is signed up at 27.5% of profit against 10.2% on the crypto board, and on the forex curves that fee moved 2.4% of all copies from above zero to below it and took the seat-weighted share in profit from 69.7% to 67.1% - close to four points on the strategies charging 30% or more, one point on those charging 5 to 15%. The crypto board's falls are deeper and faster - a third of followed leaders halved inside ninety days on the board's own drawdown figure, which is window-scoped and which we have seen reset, where the forex platform's "worst step" is a single move; neither is the follower's experience, and both flatter - and on the crypto board the halving group lost more than the whole board's net.

So, does copy trading work?

For the leader, about half the time over any given quarter, on either market. For the follower, less often than for the leader - by a margin we could measure on the crypto board, where three leaders in ten who were up had followers who were down, and could only model on the forex list, where the fee alone took close to three points off the share of copies in profit and an entry after a strong quarter more than doubled the odds of losing half.

Whether it works for a particular follower is then decided by things neither board shows on the card. Which leader: on both platforms the crowd's picks did better than the field - 83.6% of forex strategies with a hundred seats or more had most of their windows in profit against 59.7% of those with one to four, and the thirty Bybit leaders with a hundred followers or more were the only group whose pools summed to a plus. The size of the leader's worst fall was the sharpest cut on the crypto board, from 67.7% of pools in profit to 16.5%; on the forex list it was the tail it moved, from 0.1% of copies halving to 7.2%. How much of the money one leader gets: the crypto board's losses were concentrated in a handful of pools, the forex list's worst windows in a handful of strategies. How many leaders at once: the median leader on either board made a percent or two over the quarter, a margin that survives one bad pick only if it is not the only pick. And when to leave - the one variable no curve on either platform records.

We will keep re-running both computations as the panels grow. The forex departed set is seven weeks old and nearly tripled between the first reading and this one, pulling the combined figures down exactly as predicted; it is not done filling. The mechanisms will not change: the card measures the leader, the copy starts where the follower starts, the fee is charged on the way up, and the list is what survived.

Every figure above is our own computation from the platforms' per-account figures, as recorded on 11 October 2026: RoboForex curves and offers read through the same public API the platform's own pages use, with the fee charged as its help pages describe, and Bybit's per-leader board read the same day. The article was first published on 13 September 2026 on the readings of 12 and 13 September, and the September figures quoted beside the current ones are from that reading. The forex follower outcomes are a model of the fee and the curve, not a follower's statement; the crypto ones are the platform's published pool per leader. Shares and sums are dated and will move with every reading. Copy trading carries real risk, and nothing above predicts future performance.