Your money stays in your own account with the broker — you hand it to no one. The subscription is set up in the Tickmill client portal, after which the strategy’s trades are repeated on your account automatically. Nothing to install and nothing to keep running.
| A broker account | An active trading account with Tickmill — MT4 or MT5, any server. Demo, archived and restricted accounts do not qualify. The account must be hedging: the two algorithms work independently and may hold opposing positions on one instrument. | ||||
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| Minimum deposit | The minimum for copying is $1,000. The platform allows $250, but I raised my own threshold fourfold: below that the position size hits the minimum lot and a subscriber gets a different strategy from the one shown in the figures. Full agreement with the stated risk starts at $2,000. It depends on the risk you choose. The smaller the risk per trade, the smaller the position — and the sooner it hits the smallest lot the broker allows. What follows is not what you would expect: the trade still opens, but at the minimum lot, and its risk ends up larger than the one you set. You would think you had lowered your risk, while lowering it only on paper.
Why my own account started at $1,000. It exists for public statistics, not for income: what matters is that the trade history can be verified from day one. The higher-than-planned risk on it I accept deliberately — around 1.5% on gold instead of 1%. That is my money and my decision; I would not advise the same to someone who comes here to earn. | ||||
| Leverage | From 1:100. No more than seven positions are open at once, and half the time no more than two, so the margin is ample. At 1:500 the deposit load never exceeds 10%. | ||||
| Account type | Hedging is mandatory, not netting. The algorithms are independent and may hold opposing positions on one instrument; on a netting account the second trade would close the first, and the result would diverge from the strategy. Execution is market; the instruments are ordinary: currency pairs, gold, indices, oil. | ||||
| Terminal | Not needed. Copying runs on the broker’s side: your terminal can be closed and your computer switched off. MetaTrader is only useful if you want to look at the trades yourself or close something by hand. |
One trading account cannot be a strategy provider and a follower at the same time. If you already share a strategy of your own, a separate account will be needed for the subscription.
On divergence of results. Copies open at current market prices, so your result will not match the strategy exactly — the difference accumulates from spread and slippage on every trade. At a flow of about 60 trades a month this is a noticeable amount, and the smaller the account, the larger it is in percentage terms. A deposit from $1,000 and a stable connection reduce the divergence; removing it entirely is impossible.
The link in step three goes to the public page — that is where the “Invest” button is, at the 30% fee. The reduced rate of 20% for the first year is described below, in “What it costs”: it is not public, and I send the link on request.
The exact screens and buttons may differ — follow Tickmill’s official Social Trading user manual.
By default the copied volume is calculated automatically: it scales by the ratio of your balance to the strategy’s balance. If the strategy account holds 10,000 and yours holds 1,000, a 1-lot trade is repeated on your side as 0.1 lot. On top of that you can set a multiplier: a half multiplier halves both the return and the drawdown — it is a way to fit the risk to yourself.
Separately, you can set risk limits for the whole subscription: close the trades on reaching a given loss or profit, suspend the copying or unsubscribe. That is your own safety catch on top of what the strategy does.
How much to allocate. This is a high-risk part of a portfolio, not a substitute for a deposit account. The maximum drawdown over five years is 22.6% by equity: on an account of $1,000 the worst moment would have left about $774, and the longest the account went without a new high was 68 days. If that picture changes your plans, the allocation is too large.
A fair question: strategies do have a ceiling beyond which their own copies start to interfere with execution. Here is the order of magnitude. If the combined capital of subscribers reached 10 million dollars, a single trade of the portfolio would weigh about 74 lots in gold — roughly 30 million dollars of notional — and some 300 lots in euro-dollar. For instruments of that class this is a fraction of a percent of daily turnover: the volumes traded there are orders of magnitude larger. The low frequency helps too — 613 trades over the past year, two or three a day across thirteen instruments. This is not high-frequency trading, where someone else’s volume gets in the way instantly.
But an honest answer has to name the real bottleneck, and it is not the market — it is the broker. Copies are executed through its liquidity, and they open almost simultaneously, in one salvo. At what size the spread starts to widen on such a salvo I do not know: that is the platform’s internal kitchen and I have no data on it. Promising that “there is capacity for everyone” would be invention.
It would show up in the table on the Results page: live figures stand there next to the computed ones — share of winners, profit factor, average RR, drawdown. The table is rebuilt automatically every Saturday. If capacity starts to bite, the average result per trade is the first thing to sag, and the gap against the computed column becomes visible. I have no direct measurement of slippage on each individual trade: over a small number of trades it drowns in ordinary market noise, and I would rather not promise something I do not do.
Why the subscription is open from the very first day of live trading — I explain that on the Author page.
The fee is taken as a percentage of profit and only from profit: no profit, no fee. The platform withholds it, and only from the gain above the account’s previous high, so months that merely recover a past loss cost nothing. The public rate is 30% — the usual figure for this market, where copying costs 25–30%.
For the first year of live trading, until 7 September 2027, a reduced rate of 20% applies. The reason is simple: while the live track record is only being built, charging everyone the full rate does not feel right to me. That offer is not public — I send the subscription link on request, and you can ask the same way as with any other question, see the section below. The terms of an existing subscription do not change once it is set up: whoever joins at the reduced rate keeps it after the year is over.
Ask — I answer. The easiest way is through the project’s Telegram channel: the contact is in its description, and the same place holds the breakdown of copy platforms and notes on how the trading is going.
Questions of the “what happens if…” kind are the most useful: almost everything on these pages appeared because somebody asked and it turned out there was no answer.