Leaders & Followers: How Groups Work

A copy group in MimikTrader has exactly two kinds of members: a single leader account and one or more follower accounts. The leader is the account you actually trade on. The followers watch the leader and copy what it does. Everything the copier does flows in that one direction — leader to follower, never the other way around.

One Leader Per Group

A group can never have more than one leader. This is enforced by how groups are stored: a group points to a single leader account, so there is no way to accidentally end up with two accounts both driving the same group. If you want a second account to act as a source, you create a second group with that account as its leader.

There are two matching guardrails on top of that. An account cannot be both the leader and a follower in the same group, and an account that is already someone else’s follower cannot be picked as a leader. These checks run when you create or edit a group, so the roles stay clean.

An Account Belongs to One Group

Each connected trading account can belong to only one group at a time — whether it is acting as the leader or as a follower. When you open the account picker while building a group, it shows only accounts that are currently unassigned. If you want to move an account from one group to another, you first remove it from the group it is in, and it becomes available again.

The Leader Is Mirror-Only

This is the single most important thing to understand about the leader account: MimikTrader never places an order on the leader account. The leader is a mirror. The copier reads the fills, orders, and brackets that you(or your platform) create on that account and replicates them onto the followers. It does not add to, reduce, cancel, or manage the leader’s positions on its own.

In practice that means the leader account behaves exactly as it would if MimikTrader were not connected at all. You trade it through your normal platform — for example placing an order on MNQ or ES through TradingView or your Tradovate front end — and the followers react. Nothing about being a leader changes how your own trading works.

Per-Follower Sizing

Followers do not have to trade the same size as the leader. Each follower copies at its own size, controlled by a single per-follower sizing multiplier. When the leader opens or adds to a position, the follower’s order quantity is:

followerQty = max(1, ceil(leaderQty × multiplier))

The result is always rounded up to a whole contract, and never falls below 1. So a follower on a small multiplier still takes at least a 1-lot rather than being skipped, and a follower on a larger multiplier scales up proportionally. The multiplier is the one sizing control on a follower.

A worked example

Suppose the leader buys 4 MNQ and the group has two followers — one at a multiplier of 1.0 and one at 0.5:

• Follower A (×1.0): ceil(4 × 1.0) = 4 → buys 4 MNQ
• Follower B (×0.5): ceil(4 × 0.5) = ceil(2.0) = 2 → buys 2 MNQ

Both followers act on the same leader trade, at their own configured size. For the full breakdown of the formula, the rounding rule, and how sizing interacts with closing trades, see Position Sizing.

What Happens Day to Day

Once a group is set up, the flow is the same every time the leader trades:

• The leader’s order fills (or, for a working limit/stop, is submitted) on your platform.
• MimikTrader reads that activity and calculates each follower’s order using its multiplier.
• Each follower’s order is sent to that follower’s own broker account, independently.
• When the leader closes or reduces, the followers close or reduce their own positions proportionally to match.

Followers are evaluated one at a time. If one follower’s account is offline, or an order is rejected on it, that does not stop the other followers in the group from copying — each one is handled on its own.

Stopping a Follower From Copying

If you want a specific account to stop copying its leader, the reliable way to do it is to remove that follower from the group. Once removed, it no longer receives copies, and — because an account only belongs to one group at a time — it becomes available again to add to a different group or leave standalone.

Roles at a Glance

• Leader — the account you trade on. One per group. MimikTrader never places orders on it; it only reads from it.
• Follower — an account that copies the leader at its own multiplier. A group can have many. Each is copied independently.
• Membership — an account is in exactly one group at a time, as either leader or follower.