In this chapter I will give you a few ideas on how you can protect your trades or possibly outsmart your broker. The secret here is to close the trades on the slave account a bit earlier, for example 10 pips before the original stop loss or take profit is hit.

Here’s an example of this. Say you have a trade with a stop loss of 50 pips. What you would do now is close that trade once it reaches a profit of 40 pips. This is done to outsmart the broker. This may prove useful if you’re using a dealing desk broker. Some DD brokers tend to “hunt stops”.

When you use special additional software to create hidden stops, your DD broker will be fooled. Remember, while your broker can see your 50 pips stop loss, it certainly does not know that you have the intention to close that trade manually at 40 pips instead. This can also be done automatically with the help of a software that produces so called ‘’invisible stops’’ on MT4 trades.

This may not be useful for ECN or STP brokers, but for DD brokers, it is something you should try and see if your trades get better results.

Another smart thing you can do is use a hidden stop loss as an additional protection. For example, you don’t want your slave trades to have a stop loss bigger than 400 pips under any circumstances.  You can configure software like the Stealth EA to use a hidden stop loss on all or some of your trades.

This is exactly what I have done on www.vavatrade.com. I noticed that the trade generating robot had a bug and sometimes set a stop loss that was too big. So I used the Stealth EA to apply a hidden stop of 400 pips. This feature closed any trade that would reach the negative 400 pips level.

CONCLUSION

In this guide I wrote about the essential tools that are needed in order to start a trade copying campaign. I also provided step by step instructions on how you can install and configure these trading tools. I then touched on the few unique features of my Local Trade Copier software, like the ability to profit from losing EAs or bad traders and how to enable hedging on US based trading accounts.

The writing of this manual took me several months. With this guide I have attempted to provide an in depth overview of the trade copying process on MetaTrader 4. I hope that I’ve come close to this goal and that you have found my trade copying guide useful.

It’s important to understand that you don’t have to limit yourself to just trade copying. Think outside the box, be unique and try things other traders may not even think of. At the end of the day, the winners will be the Forex traders who use unique trading methods.

Now, how will you start your first trade copying campaign?