Every risk warning on this site says the same thing: you can lose the funds you allocate. That is true and it is not, on its own, useful, because it does not tell you how much to allocate. This article does. It is the one piece of advice on the platform that has nothing to do with markets and everything to do with the rest of your life.
Start from what you would not miss
The amount you copy with should be money whose total loss would be unpleasant and survivable — not money whose loss would change your life. That rules out rent, school fees, medical reserves, debt repayments and any money you will need within the next year for a known purpose. It also rules out borrowed money, without exception.
What is left, after those, is the pool from which a trading allocation can come. For most people it is smaller than they first think, and that is the correct answer, not a disappointing one.
Four questions
- If this amount went to zero next month, would anything in my life have to change? If yes — a bill unpaid, a plan cancelled — the amount is too large.
- Could I stop looking at it for a month? Money that you would need to check daily is money you cannot afford to have at risk. The best copiers check Social Copies weekly.
- Is this money I could earn again in a reasonable time? A sum that took two years to save is different from a sum that took two months, even if the number is the same.
- Am I doing this to build something, or to fix something? Money allocated to recover from a debt, a loss elsewhere or a shortfall is under pressure from the start, and pressure produces exactly the decisions that lose it.
A common rule
Financial planners often suggest that speculative investments — which leveraged trading certainly is — should be no more than 5–10% of investable savings, with the rest in ordinary savings and low-risk holdings. That is not a law, and circumstances differ, but it is a useful anchor. Someone with $20,000 in savings would, by that rule, copy with $1,000–$2,000. Someone with $2,000 in total savings should think carefully about whether any of it belongs here yet.
The minimums exist for a reason
The platform's minimum deposit is 10 USDT, and masters set their own Minimum Balance — often $100–$1,000. These numbers are deliberately low so that you can start with an amount that answers the four questions well. A first copy of $200 with a master whose minimum is $100 is a perfectly good way to learn how copying feels through a losing week. Scaling up after three good months is far cheaper than scaling down after one bad one.
Splitting the allocation
Once the total is decided, three further splits reduce the chance that a single event takes all of it:
- Across masters — two or three, in different instruments, so that one bad master or one bad market costs a third rather than all. Correlation risk explains how to choose them.
- Across time — not all at once. Add the second half after a month of watching the first.
- With an auto-stop on each copy — so that the worst case on any one copy is a known percentage, not the whole amount.
An example
A trader in his thirties with a steady income has $8,000 in savings after a year of setting money aside. His rent, bills and a planned trip account for about $3,000 of the next year's needs, and he keeps $3,000 as an emergency reserve he would not touch. That leaves $2,000 that passes the four questions — money he saved without a purpose, could rebuild in a few months, and would be irritated but not harmed to lose. Applying the 5–10% anchor to his total savings gives $400–$800, and the four questions allow up to $2,000. He starts with $600 split across two masters, sets a 20% auto-stop on each (a maximum loss of $120 per copy), and plans to add $300 after each good quarter. His downside is $240 in the worst case; his upside, at a plausible 20–30% a year, is a couple of hundred dollars — not a fortune, and exactly the right size for a first year of learning what a copy feels like through a losing month.
Commitment packages and this question
A commitment package keeps an amount with one master for a fixed term in exchange for a larger profit share. It is worth doing only with money that passes all four questions and that you are certain you will not need during the term, because stopping early costs the package bonus. The larger share is real; so is the reduced flexibility. A package is a good use of money that would otherwise sit still, and a bad use of money that might be needed.
What "less than you think" means
New copiers almost always want to allocate more than this method produces, because the returns on a good master's profile make a small allocation feel like a missed opportunity. The arithmetic runs the other way. A $1,000 copy that returns 30% in a year has made $300; a $10,000 copy that hits a 40% drawdown in month two has lost $4,000 and needs the master to make 67% just to get back. The small allocation cannot hurt you; the large one can, and the difference between the two outcomes is not the master. It is the amount.
Copy with money whose loss would be unpleasant, not life-changing. Answer the four questions, start smaller than you want, split it, and add to it only after it has earned the right.
This article is education, not investment advice. Trading and copy trading in leveraged instruments carry a high risk of losing the funds you allocate. Read the Risk Disclosure.