A real platform: IC Markets’ IC Social

Everything so far has been deliberately generic. This lesson walks one real platform — IC Social, run by our partner broker IC Markets — so the mechanics above stop being abstract.

Disclosure first, because this track demands it. ForecastingStocks is an IC Markets partner: we are paid when someone opens an account through our link, and we negotiated lower trading costs for people who do. That is exactly the affiliate incentive Chapter 1 told you to watch for. Read this lesson knowing it, and check every figure against IC Markets’ own pages.

What it is

IC Social is a social and copy trading app (iOS and Android) that connects to an IC Markets MetaTrader 4 or 5 live account using your MetaTrader login. You can copy a signal provider, or register as a provider and be copied. Leaderboards rank providers by performance, with a community feed and messaging alongside.

The size controls, in the vocabulary of the last lesson

"Allocation" is really two decisions here, and together they set your risk.

First, what your size is tied to:

Proportional to the two accounts — by equity or by balance, both available. Your size is the ratio between your account and the provider’s. Concretely, with the factor at 1 and a provider holding $10,000 against your $1,000, your trades come out at 10% of their volume — the same relative risk they are taking.

The choice between the two bases is not cosmetic. Equity includes the floating profit and loss of positions still open; balance does not. So an equity basis lets your copied size breathe with the open drawdown — as trades move against the provider, the equity behind the ratio shrinks and the next copied position comes out smaller. A balance basis holds the ratio steady until trades actually close, which keeps sizing predictable but does not step back on its own while a bad run is still open. Equity de-risks automatically; balance does what you told it to.
Mirror master size — the same size they traded, irrespective of the equity on your account. Read that twice: a position risking 2% for them can risk far more of yours.
Fixed size — the same amount on every copied trade.

Then the factor on top — your risk dial. The proportional sizing takes a multiplier from 0.1x to 10x, and this is the number you actually live with. At 1x you carry the provider’s relative risk. At 2x you take twice the share of your account that they take of theirs; at 3x, three times. In the example above, 1x is 10% of their volume, 2x is 20%, 3x is 30% — past 1x you are no longer mirroring their risk, you are levering it.

That is the part worth sitting with, because it is where most damage is done. The dial scales the drawdown exactly as faithfully as it scales the gain. A provider whose record shows a 30% worst drawdown becomes a 60% drawdown at 2x and a 90% one at 3x — and every risk-adjusted figure you were shown was measured at their risk, meaning at 1x. So Chapter 2’s question — would I have survived the worst stretch? — has to be re-asked at your own multiplier, not at theirs. Sizing up is the fastest way to turn a survivable strategy into one that closes your account.

Two more switches decide whether you even track the provider: whether to copy trades already open when you start, and whether to round sizes up to the broker’s minimum — the "minimums and partial fills" problem from the previous lesson, exposed as a setting instead of buried in the plumbing. Copying begins after a suitability form, where one is required.

Verify all of this on a small size before it matters. Not because the description above is careless — it comes from the platform’s own documentation — but because a number you have watched behave in your own account is worth more than a number you were told.

What it costs

The app is free to download and there is no subscription to the platform itself. Your costs are:

The performance fee charged by the provider you copy — up to 50% of profits, documented as calculated on profitable trades only, and settled at daily, weekly or monthly intervals depending on the provider.
The spread and commission on every replicated trade, exactly as if you had placed it yourself. Copy trading multiplies your trade count, so per-trade cost matters more here, not less — which is where a negotiated discount actually shows up.

Two questions to ask before you fund it

"Charged on profitable trades only" sounds protective, and against a subscription or a rebate model the incentive genuinely is better aligned — the provider earns when you earn. But it is not symmetric: a fee taken on winning trades is not handed back when losing trades follow. So ask, and get the answer in writing:

Is there a high-water mark? If you pay a fee in a good week, give it all back in a bad one, and then recover — do you pay again on the same ground? Without a high-water mark, a choppy strategy can charge you repeatedly while your equity goes nowhere.
What does the record look like net of that fee, with drawdown, over years? Chapter 2 is the entire answer to this one. And a leaderboard is still a leaderboard — survivorship bias does not care whose logo sits above it.

The earlier chapters still apply

A regulated broker’s app repeals none of them. You still need an active live account; the copying still happens without your judgment, at 3 a.m. included; and if you are in Brazil and tempted to become a provider yourself, Chapter 3 is not optional reading — being copied for a performance fee sits close to activities the CVM regulates.

Our commercial terms with IC Markets — the reduced spreads and commissions, who is eligible, and how to move an existing account onto them — are on our IC Markets page. Mechanics and fees can change: confirm them with IC Markets before relying on any number here.