Two different things
Latency is time: how long it takes from the source's trade to your order reaching your broker. Slippage is price: the difference between the price you expected and the price you got. Latency causes some slippage, but not all of it, and a fast copier can still produce slippage if your broker's price is different.
Where the time goes
| Step | Typical time | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Source broker reports the new position | Tens to hundreds of ms | Source broker |
| Copier matches symbol, sizes, filters | A few to tens of ms | The copier |
| Order travels to the target broker | Tens of ms | Network |
| Target broker executes the order | Tens of ms to over a second | Target broker |
| For Telegram: post delivered by Telegram | Usually under a second; occasionally more | Telegram, channel |
The copier's own part is usually the smallest. A VPS next to your broker saves milliseconds on the network leg, but nothing on the brokers' legs, which is why a cloud copier and a well-placed VPS perform similarly for anything except very short-term scalping.
Why your price differs even with zero delay
- Different price feeds. Each broker aggregates its own liquidity. EURUSD at two brokers can differ by a few tenths of a pip at the same instant; gold and indices by more.
- Spread. You buy at your ask and sell at your bid. A source on a raw-spread account and a follower on a standard account start every trade about a pip apart.
- Market movement. In fast markets, the price moves during the round trip. Around news this can be many pips.
- Requotes and partial liquidity. Some brokers reject or partially fill orders when the price moves.
What slippage costs over a month
Small numbers add up. Half a pip on one EURUSD lot is $5. A source that trades 200 times a month at 1.00 lot costs a follower $1,000 a month at half a pip of average slippage, before spreads, commissions and swaps.
monthly cost = slippage (pips) × lots × pip value per lot × trades per month
That is why copying a scalper with a 3-pip average target is a different business from copying a swing trader with a 60-pip target: the same half pip is 17% of the scalper's edge and under 1% of the swing trader's. Put your own numbers into the slippage cost calculator.
Settings that keep it small
- Max slippage: a market order is not filled if the price is more than this many pips away.
- Max signal age: signals older than this (for example 60 seconds) are skipped instead of chased.
- Time filter: skip new entries during the rollover hour and the first minutes after big opens, when spreads and slippage peak.
- News filter: pause new entries around high-impact releases.
- Spread adjustment: shift SL and TP by the entry difference, so your stop distance equals the source's.
- Account type: a raw-spread account with commission often costs less than a standard account for frequent traders.
Measure, don't guess
After two weeks of copying, compare the source's and your trades in history: average latency, average entry difference and the share of trades skipped by filters. If the difference eats a large part of the source's average win, the problem is the strategy's sensitivity to execution, not the copier.