If you are wondering if there is a way to track who’s using trade copier to copy your trading signals to other people then this article will give you an answer. I know many signal providers want to know how to identify if other people are replicating their signal trades to other MT4 accounts.

I will start by saying the ugly truth for you right away and then continue with the explanation.

There is no such software that can track if your trades are being replicated to other MT4 accounts or not and to be honest it is impossible to even know if someone is re-copying your trades to other people. The only way to be sure no one is copying your trades is to NOT send your trades to anyone. But obviously, that is not possible if you are offering Forex copy trading service.

There is also no way to create any software that can be 100% reliable to protect you from this, to be honest. I wish it could be the other way around, but it is not.

So because there is no way to know if someone is replicating your trading signals without your knowledge I simply propose to look at this situation from a different angle.

Do not worry if your trading signals are replicated without your knowledge

If people received Forex trades to their trading platform, it’s already their trades. If they pay you money to copy those trades this means they belong to them now. After all, they are opened on the client account using their money, not anyone else’s money. It is them risking money with those trades they have purchased from a signal provider. Nothing stops them from adding another trade copier app on their platform and copy those trades to other client accounts.

I know signal providers would expect their trading signals are protected by copyright laws, but I am not sure if that is the case. Of course, I am not a lawyer, so you should consult with a legal adviser if you can protect your trading signals by copyright laws. But I have not seen that anyone has done this before.

Don’t let this stop you

Signal providers cannot stop people from replicating their trades, so why bother? I mean, look at Zulutrade and other signal markets. Do they worry about that?

I’ve personally asked Zulutrade if I can re-copy their trades to any other accounts, and they said it is nowhere stated that this is prohibited. Why fight it if it’s impossible to fight it?

Does this fact of “stealing signals” stop Zulutrade for making billions? Of course not.

I know eventually there will be people who will steal your trades, but I would say it is very questionable if they are stealing them. After all, they have paid you to receive them in the first place. It’s not that each trade has its license key like software.

Possible solutions

Basically, if you send your trades to anyone or give them your MT4 password (main or investor) then there’s a chance they are copying the trades. But you’ll never know. The only way to be sure no one is copying your trades is to NOT give your password to anyone and not send your trades either. But that is not an option if you run a trading signal business.

You can state on your website that you do not allow to share or re-copy your trades to anyone else, and if you happen to catch someone doing that you can stop delivering trades to them.

This happened to me once several years ago. I caught the guy accidentally and blocked his access to my trades. But then again, he can subscribe to my signals on another name and continue re-selling my signals, only this time do it smarter. And I wouldn’t know about this.

I was able to catch him replicating my signals to others because I was using Signal Magician to sell trading signals. Signal Magician shows me MT4 account numbers and I have an email address of each user. When I found a trading record on some website that looked similar to me I saw that the same MT4 account number from that account statement also belongs to one of my customers. I would not be able to do this if I was using some other copy trading platform.

Buying/copying trades it’s like buying stock images on the internet. They all say that you can only use the image in one project, but we all know that no one will ever know how many times and in how many projects you have used the image. However, if they catch you using image many times they can sue you and they will win because they’ve stated it clearly that you are not allowed to do this.

It is also possible to create EA that would try to detect if there are other trade copier apps running on the same MT4. But clients can simply open that same MT4 account in a read-only view on another VPS server where no software is running, except for the 3rd party trade copier to copy trades to other accounts. In this case, no one in the world can tell that this is happening, and honestly, I think that this is only that person’s concern.

Conclusion

You cannot know if someone is replicating your trades and you cannot stop them. But don’t let this stop you from creating your copy trading business and selling your signals to customers. Most people are honest and will not copy the trades. Many people do not even know it is possible.
Rimantas Petrauskas
Rimantas Petrauskas

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