TradeLocker copy trading, explained from the outside in

Short answer: copy trading on TradeLocker is always driven from outside the platform. TradeLocker has no Expert Advisors, so a program elsewhere — normally on the same machine as your MetaTrader terminal — reads your trades and places them on TradeLocker through the official API. Here is the whole chain, and what each link can and cannot do.

The chain, end to end

1. Your master account on MT4 or MT5 takes a trade, however you trade — by hand, from signals, or with an EA.
2. The Sender EA on that terminal writes the open position to a small local file. It does this whether or not anything is reading it.
3. The bridge, a small Windows program in a folder of its own, reads that file several times a second.
4. TradeLocker's API receives the order and the position appears on your TradeLocker account.

Steps 1 to 3 never leave your computer. Only step 4 crosses the internet, which is also why that step sets the speed.

What it costs and why

The bridge is free, with no licence key, no trial and no account cap. That is not a promotional position, it is what the architecture allows: the program runs on your machine, so there is no per-user server for us to pay for. A copier that holds a live broker connection for every customer in the cloud has a monthly bill per account and has to recover it.

Sizing: the part people get wrong

Your TradeLocker account almost never has the same balance as your master, so copying the same lot size blindly is how a small account gets damaged. Three modes are available:

Balance ratio is the one most people should start with, because it keeps the percentage risk similar on both accounts rather than the lot size.

Symbol names will probably bite you once

Brokers and TradeLocker do not always agree on what an instrument is called. Your MetaTrader broker may list XAUUSD.r where TradeLocker has GOLD. When that happens the bridge logs that it cannot find the instrument rather than guessing at a near match, because guessing at an instrument is how you end up trading the wrong thing.

The fix is one line of configuration mapping one name to the other. It is worth doing a test trade on each symbol you actually trade before you rely on it.

Several TradeLocker accounts at once

Run one copy of the bridge per account, each in its own folder with its own configuration file. The separate folder is not cosmetic: each copy keeps a record of which master trade maps to which TradeLocker position, and two copies sharing one folder would overwrite each other's record and send closes to the wrong account.

What is not copied

Pending orders and partial closes are skipped in this version and written to the log. Market positions, closes and SL/TP changes are copied. If your approach leans on pending orders, that limit matters and it is better stated here than discovered later.

Where to go next

• The MT4 to TradeLocker copier — download, setup guide and troubleshooting
• Can you copy trade on TradeLocker? — the platform limits in full
• What is TradeLocker? — for traders arriving from MetaTrader
• Copying MT4 trades to TradeLocker — the walkthrough

Trading foreign exchange and CFDs carries a high risk of losing money. Position sizing decides how much a losing streak costs you; copying does not reduce the chance of one.