Copy Trading Setup

Copy trading means the app watches a signal source you follow (a Discord room, TradingView, or Telegram) and places the same trades in your broker, the moment a call goes out.

The whole setup, start to finish. This page walks each step.

1. Connect a broker

A broker is where your trades land. Connect at least one, choosing by what your signal source posts.

If you’re just starting, Tradier is the easiest first pick for options and stocks.

Brokers connect one of a few ways: an API token you paste (Tradier), a sign-in in your own browser through an app you register (Charles Schwab), your credentials plus a 2FA code entered in the app (Robinhood), or local software the app talks to on your computer (IBKR, STG / DAS).

On the Brokers page, click a broker card, choose Add account, enter its details, and choose Save account. The app verifies the connection itself; there is no separate test button.

The Brokers page. Each card shows a broker, its accounts, and its health state.

Clicking a card opens its connect sheet. What it asks for depends on the broker — Tradier wants one access token, most others want a login:

Tradier: paste a live or paper access token from dash.tradier.com, pick the matching mode, save.

A credentials broker: username and password, entered in the app and stored encrypted on your machine.

Each broker card shows a health state. Active, Idle, and Warming all mean the connection is fine; only Offline needs your attention.

Per-broker signup and setup detail is in the broker reference.

2. Connect a signal source

Pick where your calls come from. All three are first-class: you can connect one, or connect all three and give each its own strategy.

Why two of them need an AI key and one doesn’t: it’s about the shape the call arrives in, not the source itself.

Every source lives on the Signals page, one card each, with its own detail page showing connection state and recent traffic.

The Signals page. One card per source, each showing whether it’s connected and what it has seen lately.

3. Add an AI key (Discord and Telegram only)

Discord and Telegram calls arrive as plain English (“in SPY 540c @ 1.20”), so the app uses AI to read them into an order. Open Settings → Signal Parser:

Settings → Signal Parser. Three fields, then you’re done.

1. Provider — OpenAI or Google Gemini. Either works; OpenAI is the common pick.
2. API key — paste the key you created with that provider, then Save. Test checks it right there, so a bad key shows up here rather than as a missed trade.
3. Model — gpt-4o-mini is the recommended default: cheap, fast, and accurate on trade calls.

• Your key is billed by the provider directly, not by TradeLabs. Reading a call costs a fraction of a cent; keep a small balance topped up with your provider.
• One key covers every Discord and Telegram strategy you run — you don’t need one per strategy.

Step-by-step for getting an OpenAI key: Create an AI key.

4. Build a strategy

A strategy is the rulebook: watch this source, trade this instrument, into these brokers, at this size, with these exits. On the Strategies page, choose New strategy.

The Strategies page. Each row shows a strategy’s source, instrument, brokers, and whether it’s running.

The editor is split across tabs. General is what opens, and for a first strategy it’s most of the work:

1. General — signal source, instrument, direction, ticker.
2. Brokers — which accounts this strategy fires into.
3. Sizing — how big each trade is.
4. Risk & exits — stop loss, take profit, trailing stops.
5. Protections — the guardrails to set before you go live.

The General tab

1. Signal source — Discord, TradingView, or Telegram. For Discord and Telegram you also pick the exact channel or chat here; for TradingView you list the alert names to match.
2. Instrument — the single most important field. It decides which other fields and which brokers you see at all.
3. Direction, ticker, and order type — leave Direction on Both and Ticker on ALL to follow everything the room calls.
4. Default expiration — options only: which expiry to use when a call doesn't name one.

Turn Inherit trade details from message on, in the Signal source section, so the strategy uses what the call actually says (strike, expiration, direction) instead of these defaults.

The other three

Brokers — pick one to start. Tick several and one signal fires into all of them at once.

Sizing — a fixed quantity in contracts or shares, a dollar amount, or a percent. Keep it small for a first strategy.

Protections — the guardrails, and the ones worth setting before you ever go live. Reach for Duplicate protection, Slippage cap, and Maximum trade value (a hard dollar cap per trade) first.

The remaining tabs (Risk & exits, Filters, Notifications) have sensible defaults and can wait until you have a working trade. Every field is documented in the strategy reference.

A worked example, following a channel that posts calls like BTO SPY 450C 1/19 @ 2.50:

With Inherit trade details from message on, the strategy takes the strike, expiration, and direction straight from the call, so BTO SPY 450C 1/19 @ 2.50 becomes a $500 order for SPY 450 calls expiring 1/19, with a 30% stop and 100% target, into Tradier.

Save it, but leave it switched off. A strategy only trades once you turn it on, and step 5 is where you check it does the right thing before it can spend anything.

5. Test before you go live

1. Simulate a call. Use Simulate in the strategy editor to push a sample call through the strategy and read the result: which broker and account it would hit, the strike and expiration it parsed, and the order it would place. Confirm it matches what you expect.

   Heads up

   Simulate places a real order if the broker it routes to is trading live. Only Tradier and IBKR have a practice mode. To use it, open that broker on the Brokers page, edit the account, and set Mode to Paper — on Tradier that also needs a Paper access token from its sandbox, and on IBKR it needs TWS or Gateway running on the paper port. Every other broker is live-only: on those, don’t simulate with real size — go straight to the smallest possible real trade in step 2.

2. One real trade, smallest size. Once the simulation looks right, put the broker back on Live if you switched it, drop the size to the minimum (one contract, or the smallest dollar amount), turn the strategy on, and wait for one live call. Confirm it fills in your broker and the exits behave.

Check the fill price, that it hit the right broker and account, and that stop and take-profit are set, before you scale the size back up.

6. Go live

Your test trade already turned the strategy on. Going live is just putting the size back where you want it: open the strategy, set the real Sizing, and save. It keeps showing Running, and from now on every matching call is read and traded automatically — as long as the app stays open on a computer that’s on and online.

Watch it work on the Overview page: live profit, what each strategy is doing, broker health, and every signal and fill as it happens.

The Overview page. Your live picture once strategies are running.

Where to go next

• The App, Day to Day: the screens you’ll use once you’re live
• Strategies & Settings reference: every setting, per instrument
• The Web Dashboard: start, stop, and check on strategies from any browser