Risk Disclosure Statement

You can lose money

Trading in securities, derivatives, cryptocurrency and event contracts involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. You should copy only with money you can afford to lose entirely. Do not trade with borrowed money, money needed for living expenses, or money you cannot leave at risk for the time the strategy needs.

Copying a stranger is not the same as being them

The traders you copy are unrelated people trading their own money for their own reasons. Their goals, time horizon, tax position, other holdings and tolerance for loss are not yours and are unknown to you. They may change how they trade at any time, take on more risk, stop trading, or have been lucky rather than skilled. Nothing about a rank, score or badge tells you what happens next.

Your copy is proportional and delayed. Even at the fastest sources there is a delay between the trader's fill and yours, and prices move in between. Your fills may be worse, partial, or not happen. Small allocations round to fewer shares or contracts than the exact proportion, and some positions may be too small to copy at all.

Risk limits, position caps, cash reserves, drawdown guards, reduce the size of what can go wrong. They do not prevent losses, they act after the fact on the data available, and they cannot act while a venue is down.

Leverage and derivatives

Perpetual futures and other leveraged products let a trader control positions many times larger than their capital. Gains and losses are magnified in the same proportion. A position can be liquidated by the venue on an adverse move, losing the entire margin, and funding payments accrue while positions are open. Copying a leveraged trader exposes you to these mechanics at your own venue, within the limits you set. Moves of more than 100% of an account in a day are possible in either direction.

Cryptocurrency

Crypto-assets are extremely volatile, trade around the clock, can lose most or all of their value, and are subject to rapidly changing regulation. On-chain records are public and accurate as recorded by the network, but the identity, intentions and off-chain holdings of a wallet are unknown.

Prediction markets and event contracts

An event contract pays a fixed amount if an event happens and nothing if it does not; it can and often does go to zero. Outcomes depend on the resolution rules of the venue, which may differ between venues that list similar events. When a trader you copy holds a market on one venue and your account is on another, nothing is substituted unless you switched on equivalent contracts for that copy; when you have, the contract used may differ in terms, price, liquidity and resolution, and where no clear equivalent exists that position is not copied. Availability of event contracts is restricted in many jurisdictions; you are responsible for your eligibility.

Betting on sport

Betting is not investing, and copying a bettor is not copying a portfolio. A bet is a wager on an event. It cannot be sold, hedged or rebalanced once placed; it pays a fixed amount or it pays nothing, usually within hours or days.

The odds you are offered already contain the operator's margin. That margin is the reason a sportsbook is a business: across all bets and all bettors it is a negative expected return, and no selection method removes it. A bettor with a long winning record may be skilled, may have been lucky, or may have been betting into odds that no longer exist by the time a slip reaches you. Sports results are close to random over any short run, so a record that looks convincing can be produced by chance alone, and the amount of history needed to tell skill from luck in betting is far larger than most records here contain.

You can lose the whole of every stake, one after another, quickly. Losses do not pause, and there is no position left over to recover later. Stake only money you can lose entirely without it mattering.

Nothing about a bet is protected the way an investment can be. There is no investor-protection fund, no Canadian Investor Protection Fund coverage, no securities regulator to complain to, and no recourse to us: the bet is between you and the operator, under their rules on voids, settlement, limits and disputes.

Gambling can become compulsive, and it does so most easily when it is framed as a way to make money. If it stops being fun, or you are betting to recover losses, or you are hiding it, stop and get help. ConnexOntario is free, confidential and available at any hour: 1-866-531-2600, or connexontario.ca. Every registered Ontario operator must offer deposit limits, time-outs and self-exclusion, and OLG runs a self-exclusion programme.

Simulated (paper) results and hypothetical performance

Paper copying and any displayed backtest, projection or "what you would have made" figure are hypothetical. Hypothetical results have inherent limitations: they are prepared with the benefit of hindsight, they do not involve financial risk, and no hypothetical record can fully account for the impact of financial risk in actual trading, for example the ability to withstand losses or to keep following a strategy in spite of losses. Fills, liquidity, fees, taxes, outages and your own decisions will differ in real trading. No representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown.

Past performance

Past performance, of any trader, strategy or category, does not guarantee or predict future results. Rankings and scores are computed from published history and change as history accrues.

Data and its limits

Regulatory filings are published on a delay (weeks for some, days for others) and report holdings, not the trades that produced them; trades derived from filings are estimates. Venue data is as published by the venue and subject to its errors and outages. Some figures, a return on capital where a venue publishes only profit, a closed position where a venue publishes only fills, are reconstructed by a disclosed, conservative method and are estimates. A trader shown as "under review" has data we could not verify.

Your responsibilities

Understand every instrument before you allow it to be copied into your account. Set limits you would be comfortable hitting. Check your venue account directly; do not rely solely on this service for the state of your money. Understand the tax treatment of trading in your jurisdiction; nothing here is tax advice. If you do not understand a risk described here, do not copy until you do.