This article walks through the full journey of a copied trade, from the moment you place it to the moment it fills on your follower accounts, so you can see exactly what Tradecopia does and where the desktop and web plans differ.
You might need this article if:
You want to understand the full journey of a trade, from your screen to your follower accounts
You're wondering why the web plan replicates faster than the desktop plan
You want to know which parts of the process Tradecopia handles and which depend on your own setup
You've heard that trades are copied "in parallel" and want to know what that means for your followers
You want to understand where speed and latency come from in copy trading
The trade journey, step by step
A copied trade passes through the same six stages every time. Your leader account is the account you trade in directly, the one Tradecopia watches. Your follower accounts are the accounts that copy it.
You place a trade on your trading platform. Your trading platform is the app you actually click buy or sell in. It is not always your broker. Many traders execute on a third-party platform such as TradingView, Quantower, or Sierra Chart, which has their broker account connected to it. Your broker is the company that holds your account and sends orders to the market, for example Tradovate, NinjaTrader, TopStepX, or Rithmic. When you execute on a platform, the platform passes your order to your broker.
Your order reaches your leader broker's server. The order travels from your platform to your broker's server, which receives it and fills it. Your leader account now holds the position.
Tradecopia detects the fill. The moment your leader broker registers the trade, Tradecopia picks up that event. Tradecopia does not place the trade for you; it reacts to the trade you already made.
Tradecopia sends it to every follower at the same time. Tradecopia fans the order out to all your follower accounts in parallel, meaning all at once rather than one after another. No follower waits in a queue behind another.
Each follower sends the order to its own broker. Every follower account pushes the matching order to its own broker's server.
The follower brokers fill and confirm. Each follower broker fills the order and sends an acknowledgement back to Tradecopia confirming it is done.
What is the same on every plan: the replication engine
Both the desktop plan and the web plans use the exact same internal replication engine. It is built for concurrency, so it sends orders to all of your followers at the same time instead of in sequence, and the internal copying happens in a matter of milliseconds.
This part does not change between plans. Whether you are on desktop or web, the core copying is identical and fast.
What is different: the path your orders travel
The difference between the plans is not the engine. It is the network path your orders take on the way in and on the way out.
The very first leg, from your platform to your leader broker, always depends on your own environment. That is true on every plan. The plans differ in what happens after Tradecopia receives the leader event and while the orders travel out to your follower brokers.
On the desktop plan, Tradecopia runs on your own computer. Orders travel out over the public internet, using your home or office network as the starting point. They pass through many hops before reaching each broker's server, so the speed depends on your own connection and how busy the public internet is at that moment.
On the web plans (Pro+ Lite and Pro+), Tradecopia runs on our own infrastructure, not your computer. From the point we receive the leader event onward, the journey runs on our servers instead of your network. There is still an external leg to reach the brokers, but it no longer depends on your setup.
Why the web plan is faster
Our servers are hosted extremely close to the exchange and broker infrastructure in Chicago, practically around the corner, on dedicated high-speed connectivity. That dedicated connection cuts out the congestion and unpredictability of the general public internet and gives a short, low-latency path straight to the brokers. Latency is simply the delay between sending an order and it arriving.
Because the desktop plan relies on your own network and the wider public internet, its path to the brokers is usually longer and less predictable. That difference in the external path is why the web plans typically replicate with lower latency than the desktop plan.
Both plans copy your trades reliably. The difference here is speed, not whether replication works.
What this means for you
The start of the journey, from your platform to your leader broker, is always down to your own environment, whatever plan you are on. A slow or unstable platform or connection at that first step affects every copied trade that follows.
The internal copying is the same fast, parallel engine on both plans.
On the web plans, the path from Tradecopia out to your brokers runs on our low-latency infrastructure instead of your own network, which is what gives the web plans their speed advantage on the external legs.
Related articles
How does Tradecopia copy trades between accounts? — the replication mechanics this pipeline builds on
What does Tradecopia control, and what does my broker control? — which parts of the journey are Tradecopia's and which are your broker's
What is the difference between Tradecopia desktop and the web versions? — where each plan runs, in more detail
Why do follower orders fill at a different price than the leader? — how the external legs and timing lead to fill price differences