An orphan position is an open position on a follower account that was not placed by the leader. The most common cause is the Position Reconciler being disabled on the copy group — without it active, Tradecopia does not check whether follower positions match the leader and will not automatically exit positions that do not belong there.

You might be experiencing this if:

The Position Reconciler — a built-in safeguard in Tradecopia — monitors every follower account and automatically exits any position that does not match the leader's current direction and symbol. When enabled, an orphan position is detected and exited as soon as the next fill event occurs on that account.

When disabled, orphan positions accumulate silently. They are not automatically closed, and they persist until you manually intervene.

The Position Reconciler is enabled by default on new copy groups. If it is currently disabled on your group, that is the starting point for investigation. See How the Position Reconciler protects your follower accounts for full details on how to configure it.

Manual trade placed while replication was paused. If replication was paused on a follower account and a trade was placed manually — or if the follower account was traded independently — that position will remain open when replication resumes because the reconciler was not monitoring it.

Bracket order continuation after the leader closed. A leader's ATM bracket closes cleanly, but the follower's bracket continuation (a take profit or stop leg) fires independently after the leader is already flat. The follower ends up holding a position the leader no longer has. The reconciler would exit this immediately if enabled.

Opposing or hedge position at exit. A trade placed on the follower at the close of a leader trade — for hedging or risk purposes — persists after the original position is gone, creating a new orphan in the opposite direction.

Position carried over from a previous session. A trade from an earlier session was never closed and was not detected because the Position Reconciler was not active at the time.

If the reconciler is confirmed enabled but an orphan position still occurred, two scenarios are likely:

The app was offline when the position opened. The Position Reconciler can only act on events it observes in real time. If Tradecopia was closed, crashed, or disconnected when the orphan position was created, the reconciler had no opportunity to detect it. See Why did my follower accounts miss trades that were placed on the leader? for the app offline scenario.

Note: On Pro desktop, the reconciler stops functioning if the app is closed or loses its connection. On Pro+ Lite and Pro+, the reconciler runs on Tradecopia's infrastructure and remains active regardless of your local app state — however, a server-to-broker connection issue at the infrastructure level could have the same effect.

Replication was halted by a breach. If the follower toggle shows a breach indicator, replication stopped automatically after a position mismatch was detected. This is the reconciler working correctly — it is a breach shutdown, not a failed detection. The follower position needs to be reviewed and resolved before replication resumes.