Don’t Fall for Copy Trading — Here’s Why You Won’t Get A 5x Like Me

What’s better than the founder using his own money to navigate the traps, turning them into features just for you?

This is the story of a founder trying again & again with his own money to build the best on-chain copy trading platform for you.

TL;DL:

• 7 criteria I defined for top traders.
• 4/12 remarkable failure attempts while turning $2.5k into $13k.
• Signature features from these mistakes & Upcoming exciting features.
• How to join private beta (don’t miss the last part!)

It all started with an internal challenge: Could I use Candlestick.io, our product, to make a $10K profit within a month? The answer was a resounding yes — and then some! Here’s how I did it, and how you can, too, with our soon-to-be-released Copy Trading Strategy.

The Simple Secret: I find a good trader and copy their trades. Does it sound like you can put an address into any copy trading tool and start making money? Totally wrong. The execution part does mean a lot of difference even copying the same address.

$2.5K initial investment, generated $41,590 buy volume, made $10,428 profit, 25% ROI. 5x my initial capital into $12.7K in a month.

Follow @Candlestick_io and @Kylethelu on Twitter and you can DM me for my address.

Part 1: Finding Top Traders

This part is about using one of our most popular features, TraderScan to find top traders onchain. If you are already a master of Candlestick, you can go to Part 2.

There are two ways to do it on Candlestick: to browse smart traders that our algorithm finds or to build your own. The latter would take you more time, but everyone has his/her definition of a smart trader — that’s what TraderScan is for.

Here’s what I look for in a top trader:

• Active Trading: Must have traded at least 6 tokens in the last month.
• Knows when to take profit: At least $100K in realized profit.
• Solid Win Rate: A minimum of 60%.
• Avoids Honeypots: Less than a 10% chance of falling into scams.
• Not a Bot: I don’t want to compete on gas fees.
• Make Meaningful Bets: Avg trade size above $1k.
• Significant Holdings: Should have some serious cash balance.

So eventually I generated some targeted addresses with this configuration.

Using these criteria, I found some rockstar addresses.

Then I studied their trading habits: Some traders only trade micro-caps, some always go for the high multipliers, and some earn big profits from maybe just one or two of their portfolios.

The key is to find traders whose risk tolerance and strategy align with yours. This is super important — you are like an LP of these “funds,” and you must understand your GP. If you don’t understand the thesis of the traders you copy, you will judge based on your knowledge again and may lose while they are making profits.

Eventually, I found 3 addresses that specialize in trading low-cap tokens. After monitoring some of their trades, I found that they are the kind of low-cap trader who doesn’t ape in at the very beginning (so they don’t get high slippage) but always finds a sweet spot to enter when the token price drops from the peak.

Now let’s kick off.

My favorite address who prev had a 60% win rate and 40% ROI with $150k profit in 3 months

Part 2: Mastering Copy Trading Execution

In this part, you will learn how I turned $2.5k into $13k, the mistakes I made, and how they turned into a revolutionary product for crypto trading.

Mistake #1: When to Enter? Just Ape ❌

I started monitoring these 3 addresses at the same time, and I tried to replicate every single trade they made as soon as I could. But then, most of the time, I kept failing until I acquired the tokens at a 20% or even higher price.

What’s even worse is that I soon realized that when he sold for a 40% profit, I didn’t get a 20% profit — not only did I buy at a 20% higher price and sold at a 20% lower price.

Takeaway:

Then I quickly adjusted: I needed to control my entry price to within 5% of his. If I fail to do so, I’ll either drop this opportunity or find a way to DCA for a lower price of his entry. Because I believed so much in the token he picked, I ended up getting a higher RoI than him.

It became a feature for you:

When copying a trade, the system will keep looking for your desired price as a limited order — so that you don’t just ape in a token at a much higher slippage than others.

My Man’s entry price was 0.0(6)5870; through DCA, I entered at an average cost of about 0.0(6)46, much lower.

Mistake #2: When to Profit? Too Emotional ❌

I always get overexcited when seeing a token go 3x and start thinking of it becoming the next $Shib or $Pepe. A few times, I got FOMO and didn’t sell the tokens during a surge, when “My Man” sold it. I ended up selling for $5k instead of $50k profit.

Takeaway:

I realized that trading was fun until you get emotional. The art of copy trading, or making an automation strategy, is not you being the trader; it is unleashing the superpower of your “trading buddies”, aka the Copy-Tradee, who is apparently better than 95% of the traders in the market.

So eventually, 3 features for you:

1. The system will sell the same percentage of your holdings when your copied address sells a percentage of a token.
2. In addition to that, you can set a universal Stop Loss % to all tokens in the Strategy (and Take-Profit Order is otw!) to set your hands free.
3. What if sometimes I felt I could exit better than my “Trading Buddies?” Yes, I did that too. I wanted to sell on my own. Well, you can always interrupt an ongoing copy-trading strategy and sell on your own.

Mistake #3: Let’s Make a Huge Bet! YOLO ❌

When I started, I made a very common mistake (I didn’t know it was common until I talked to many users/potential users) — I tend to put half of my initial pot in my first copy trade. I was looking for overnight success, especially since I followed an address with an almost 70% win rate and insane ROI.

Takeaway:

But it is wrong. There’s no guarantee that a 100% win rate trader will profit from his next trade. Traders will also make different trades to adjust their positions. So, allocating funds for only 1–3 trades into a strategy is bad because there’s no more buffer.

So, another feature,

Our system will automatically suggest your trade size based on your initial investment in a Strategy.

Review execution details like trade sizes and configuration

Mistake #4: Set and Forget ❌

When I was copy trading, I learned two things:

• Investment is a number game; not even Warren Buffet can win every trade.
• Since it is a number game, you just need to bet on the best player because eventually, they will win.

A great example would be this address, called “Strong Man” that I followed. He was making 50% ROI at a 50% win rate in the previous 3-month period, and then all of a sudden, he started losing and dropped his 7d ROI to 5%. I immediately removed him from my Strategy to avoid his bad games.

However, I still monitor his performance on my watchlist. When he comes back strong later, I could trade with him again.

That’s why we made our Copy Trading Strategy so flexible: You can always add/remove addresses or pause the strategy with just 2 clicks.

Mistake #5 — #12:

I’m skipping them before it gets too long, but if you pay attention to the details in our copy trading feature, I’m sure you will know what I’ve been through!

Part 3: What’s Next?

Congrats! You’ve made it this far. Now you know the ins and outs of our Copy Trading Strategy. It’s time to put this knowledge into action.

Exciting News: Our closed beta for the Copy Trading Strategy is launching Tomorrow or the day after! If you’re already a Candlestick user and applied for beta access, expect a message from us soon.

Have you not done it yet? Do this

Public Beta Coming Soon: Our public beta will be live at the end of August.

Upcoming Features:

Take Profit Orders: Automatically lock in gains.

Smart allocation: Adjust the size of your trades automatically

Strategy for Specific Tokens: Tailor your strategy to individual tokens.

Referrals: Invite your friends to trade and get % of their trading fee

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