Introduction

Copy trading is not easy; it’s not something you can just walk into and start making a bunch of money on your first day. It requires knowledge, experience, and strategy. A copy trading strategy is an essential and necessary part of being a successful copy trader. Without one, your wallet can get drained quickly—I’ve seen it too many times, and it’s hard to watch.

In this article, I will explain all the copy‑trading strategies that I currently know of and share what I believe is the ultimate copy trading strategy. Before we start, I’m not talking about signal trading or “nonsense” copy trading where someone else trades for you and takes a percentage of the profits. I’m talking about real copy trading happening on the Solana network or other cryptocurrency networks where you can potentially make thousands of dollars a day—literally—and where you have full control over your destiny, your bots, and your settings.

So strap in, and let’s dive into the top 4 copy trading strategies you need for success.

Copy Trading Strategy #1: Scalping

The first copy‑trading strategy I want to discuss is scalping. Scalping is when you buy and sell relatively quickly for a small profit. The whole goal is multiple, repeatable small 10–30% wins: get in and get out.

If you didn’t read this article and tried to copy trade someone on Solana with an 80% win rate and a 20% ROI, you would probably get destroyed. This is because of slippage. In copy trading, unless you front‑run the copy trader (which can happen with OdinBot), you are always going to buy at a higher price than your mirror (the wallet you are copying), and you will always sell at a lower price. Straight automatic copy trading makes slippage unavoidable. When a trader buys a coin, it affects the price; if the trader uses a lot of capital, it affects it more. If many other people are copying, the impact is even greater.

Therefore, you might not enter the trade until the price is 30–40% higher than the person you’re trying to copy. If he’s only earning 20% and you’re entering 40% higher and selling 40% lower, you’ll lose a lot of money even when he wins. It’s crazy, but it’s something you need to understand to be successful.

To learn more about slippage and what slippage settings to use in your copy trading bot, watch this video. It will teach you everything.

Now that you’re familiar with slippage, you know you can’t straight‑up copy‑trade a scalper—it won’t work. When trying to copy trade someone like this, there are a few things you need to do:

1. Set a low slippage in your copy trading bot. This way, if slippage goes above your set amount, you skip the trade and avoid a bad entry.
2. Don’t copy the trader one‑to‑one. Try to sell either before or after him by selling manually with a take‑profit. Find a high win‑rate scalper who gets good entries into good tokens; copy his buys with low slippage so you only enter coins with a higher market cap or when his trades don’t impact the price too much. Then don’t copy his sell so you avoid slippage up and down. The margins are too small to endure both. Instead, use a bot like OdinBot where you can set a take profit of 20–30% without copying his sell. If he’s making that much, you probably can too.

Test your settings using the settings analyzer in CopyTraderr. It will tell you, with 100% accuracy from his last 50–100 trades, what the best take‑profit and stop‑loss settings would have been. Learn more about that tool here.

Recap: For the scalping strategy, you want to get in fast with low slippage and use a take profit that matches what the copy trader earns or what the settings analyzer recommends. Make sure you turn off the option to copy the trader’s sell so you can exit on your own, independent of their slippage on the way down.

Important: If you are going to scalp, you cannot use a low amount of Solana for each purchase. Fees will eat away all your profit. Since you’re only taking 10–20% profit, you need to use a large buy‑sum because you’ll lose 5–10% in fees no matter what. You also need to use turbo fees to get in fast, which is even worse. Therefore, if you’re going to scalp, consider trading with 0.5–1 SOL or higher—the higher the better. Watch this video to learn exactly how much you need to start copy trading depending on your strategy and what your buy size should be given your fees.

Strategy #2: Going for Big Wins

Strategy number two is better for traders starting with a low balance who need a small buy size. This strategy involves going for big, high‑multiple wins. It’s perhaps the most appealing strategy to newcomers because the adrenaline rush of 10X’ing your money in five minutes is what draws people to the space. But this strategy isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

When looking for traders on the Solana or Ethereum networks who tend to hit big wins, you’ll notice that between those wins they usually lose many tokens. With this strategy, you need enough money in your balance to absorb 10–15 losing trades to get the one trade that makes all your money back plus more.

For example, if you’re trading with 0.05 SOL, you could lose 50% on 10 trades in a row and only lose 0.25 SOL. Then you could hit a 15× and make 0.75 SOL. That’s the strategy here: absorb the hits and then nail the big win. You might even hit a 35× or more—crazier things have happened.

Key points to remember:

1. Use a high slippage. You don’t want to miss the big win due to slippage. Make sure you get into every trade; I recommend a slippage of 50% and high fees to enter quickly.
2. Avoid using a stop loss smaller than 50%. Many traders who achieve big wins allow coins to go down and up multiple times before selling. It’s common for coins to drop 50% or more before rising for a 15×. Make sure you have enough SOL in your balance to last through these swings; keep your slippage high and your stop loss large, and then just wait.

Strategy #3: Buying the Dip

This copy‑trading strategy is my favorite, but it’s also one of the more risky and difficult to execute. We previously discussed the problem of slippage in copy trading—you will always enter at a higher price than the wallet you’re copying and exit at a lower price. But what if you could eliminate slippage, at least on the way up? That’s the premise of this strategy.

Here’s how it works: you don’t copy the buy automatically using your bot. Instead, you receive a trade alert on your phone when your target wallet makes a trade. You open the trade in Photon within five seconds (ideally) and wait to buy the token until it dips below the target wallet’s entry price. This lets you enter the trade with zero slippage—possibly even “sub‑zero” slippage.

If the coin goes up and they sell for a 50% win, you will likely sell for a 50% win or more instead of selling for a 20% win due to combined buy and sell slippage. However, this doesn’t work with every trader, and there are nuances and tricks to executing it without staring at the screen constantly. Because if you don’t use a copy‑trading bot to copy the buy and you buy manually, there’s no way to copy the sell automatically.

I created a technique using a trigger wallet in OdinBot. You copy both your target wallet and your trigger wallet. You buy a small amount of the coin on Photon or with a Telegram bot; this triggers the buy in OdinBot. Since you can turn off buys for the target wallet, OdinBot will wait until you buy at the lower price. Then you can turn off cross‑mirror prevention, so that when the target wallet sells, OdinBot will sell your token. It might sound confusing, but it’s easier than it seems. I made a whole video demonstrating this strategy and how to execute it perfectly. You can watch it here.

Strategy #4: Copying Insider Wallets

The fourth strategy I’ll discuss is copying insider wallets. This strategy involves identifying a coin that has performed very well and examining the transactions just before it started to pump. The goal is to find out who bought the token then, because those buyers were likely insiders who knew the coin was about to surge.

You can do this using Photon or BirdEye by viewing all transactions within a specific time period and then going through each wallet that bought during that period. However, it’s extremely time‑consuming and may take hours, with no guarantee of results—there may not be any insiders for that wallet.

At CopyTrader, we’ve developed a tool that allows you to input any token address and any time span into an analyzer. The tool spits out anyone who bought the token within that period, listing them in a grid with all the relevant stats: win rates, ROI, earnings on that token, and more. You immediately know which wallets you care about and which you don’t. This saves you hours of time and endless scrolling, and you avoid potentially getting no results.

Conclusion

There are many strategies you can use for copy trading, but these four are the most powerful in my view. If you want to learn more, head to CopyTraderr.com where we have the best analytics tools for finding profitable wallets to copy and for analyzing them to know exactly which settings to use. It’s truly like nothing else out there.

We also have a very active Discord where we discuss copy‑trading strategies every day, as well as a YouTube channel where we drop tutorials and other interesting content. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you in the next article!