I’ve been trading on and off for the last three years. It’s been a while journey, and I’ve certainly learned my fair share of hard lessons. I first started it down the manual trading path. I got crushed.

That led me to the copy trading path. I got crushed again.

But eventually, with practice, I started to see success, both manual and copy trading and right now I do a little bit of both.

I personally lean towards copy trading, but in this article, I’m going to break down the pros and cons of manual trading and copy trading so you can decide which one is right for you.

I’ll be using cryptocurrency as my reference, but everything I’m going to talk about in this article translates to any market, including Forex or the traditional stock markets.

Enjoy and don’t forget to leave a comment below letting me which type of trading you’d prefer manual training or copy trading (and why!)

Manual Trading Vs Copy Trading: The Differences

The main difference between manual trading and copy trading is that when you manually trade, you are doing your own research and executing the trades yourself on whatever platform you choose.

If I were trading on the Solana network, which is my favorite cryptocurrency network to trade on, then I would be scrolling through Photon, looking for good tokens to ape into and buying myself.

On the contrary, copy trading is where you don’t choose which coins you buy, but you instead look for successful traders who are manually trading and then use a bot like Odin Bot to automatically copy them anytime they buy a coin and anytime they sell. You can use services like Copy Traderr to get lists of profitable traders given to you every single day.

Both are fun, both are potentially lucrative. But which one is right for you? Let’s find out.

Copy Trading: Pros And Cons

I was going to talk about manual trading first, but let’s get into the reason why were all here.

Here are the pros and cons of copy trading.

The Pros:

Copy trading is awesome. I really love it. The exhilaration of checking your phone to see you just made a bunch of money without doing anything. Wow. Here are all the pro’s of copy trading over manual trading.

1: Passive Income

If you can master copy trading then you truly have a source of passive income that runs 24/7.

Yes, it requires time to find wallets and analyze them, but with tools like Copy Traderr this is actually extremely easy and quick now.

So once you find some gem wallets (we drop a list of 100 of them every day) then you can plug them in and truly make money while you sleep.

Here’s some example from my own life:

I have been grocery shopping, spending around $90 and then got out to the car to see I just made $90 on a trade. Free groceries, nice!

I’ve also woken up to hundreds of dollars added onto my balance. That’s a great feeling.

So if you take our course, there is no reason why you cannot make consistent passive income from copy trading.

2: Saves So Much Time

This goes hand in hand with what we just spoke about.

But with copy trading you don’t have to spend 16 hours a day at the computer like a lot of successful day traders do. You can put in some time to set up your bot and then do whatever the f*ck you want.

Go to the beach, hand with your friends, workout. And you will be trading automatically while you do so.

It doesn’t guarantee that you will be trading successfully, but eventually with practice you will be.

Plus you can peek in on your bot with your phone every few hours just to make sure things are OK.

3: No Experience Needed

You literally don’t need to know anything about stocks, crypto or trading to start copy trading.

The bot take 10 minutes to set up. You just need to have some successful traders on hand (we supply that) and a little bit of money which you can risk.

That being said, while you don’t need to know about trading per say – if you don’t understand the nuances of copy trading then you are likely to get burned and lose all your money.

It’s no magic pill.

But with our free course you can learn everything you need to know in about a day.

The Cons

Copy trading is not all sunshine and rainbow though. There are some cons, and here they are.

1: Slippage

Slippage is a real bitch.

Slippage, also known as price differential, is the difference in price from the entry that the wallet you are copying gets into an asset and the price that you get.

When you copy trade someone you will never (well almost never) get the same entry as that trader. I say almost never, because sometimes you can actually get a better price or with some bots like Odin Bot you can end up buying before the trader you are copying! It’s rare but it happens.

Without slippage all of us copy trader would be rich AF.

Slippage is affected by a few factors:

a) The amount your mirror buys

b) How many other people are copying that mirror

c) How many other people are buying the token at the same time

So if you are copying someone who buys $10,000.00 worth of a token, has 10 people copying him and is buying in a bundle with many other wallets – they may end up buying the token at $1.00 and you won’t end up getting in until $2.00! This is an extreme case but it happens.

Then, the trader can end up selling at a price of $2.50 and you may not end up selling until $1.50 so your mirror just made +150% and you lost 25%!

Crazy but this is why copy trading is not as easy as people think.

Luckily in copy trading bots you can set slippage limitations so if the slippage exceeds 20% or whatever amount you designate you will skip the trade. So worry not.

Plus, you simply have to avoid the wallets that have a huge price impact and copy traders who buy $50 worth of something with no one copying them. Then your slippage can be as low as 5%. So if they make a 50% gain, then you will make a 40% gain or something like that. Not bad.

2: Lack of Control

One major con of copy trading is the lack of control you have, but that comes as a price of free time.

It’s possible that a trader can realize someone is copying them and buy 100 shit tokens to drain your wallet. It happens. But it is rare.

Plus, with Odin Bot you can protect against this by limiting the # of. Buys you make per hour or even per day with each trader. You can also turn your bot off at night if you want.

Manual Trading: Pros and Cons

Manual trading has its pros and its cons for sure. Let’s dive into each.

Pros:

So we dove deep into the pros and cons of copy trading. Here are some of the pro’s of manual trading over copy trading which you may find alluring.

1: Full Control – Better Entry & Exits

The most obvious pro of manual trading is that you are in full control the outcome. You don’t have to worry about slippage, which is a problem and copy trading because since you’re copying someone else, you’re always going to get a worse price than them.

With manual trading, you can wait until there’s a nice dip and enter had a perfect time and offering the lowest price. You can never really achieve this in copy trading because you are all always entering after someone makes a purchase.

The same goes for when you want to sell you can sell at any time at a peak while I copy trading often times since you’re copying someone else to sell, you’ll be copying or selling after the price drops.

2: Learning a Skill

Another pro of manual trading is that you are learning the skill of trading and becoming better at something, while in copy trading you’re still learning a skill, but you are not really getting any better at trading the stock market or the cryptocurrency market. You are just learning how to spot good wallets.

You are letting someone else do it for you so you’re not developing those experiences that you need to grow as a trader. But you may not care about that.

The Cons:

Here are the cons of manual trading, and what personally keeps me away from it.

1: It’s Very Time Consuming

The main con of manual training would be how time-consuming it is. You have to sit there on your computer for hours at a time scrolling through all sorts of different assets.

You have to do your research, whether it be on a stock you were interested in or by scrolling on X and looking for what memes are trending right now.

It’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. Time that you could be spending with your friends and family.

2: It’s Very Difficult

It takes many years to become a fantastic trader, so when you first start off manually trading, you may be really, really bad at it. You may find it hard to know which tokens or stocks to choose, and you may find yourself losing money very quickly.

Alternatively, copy trading allows you to piggyback off of traders with decades of experience so you don’t have to worry about any of that.

The Ultimate Solution

For me the ultimate solution s to do a mix of copy trading and manual trading.

This is when you rely on copy trading for entering trades, but then you turn the selling function off in your bot and when you get notified of a purchase you hop on your laptop or phone and manually sell the trade when you wish. This way you only get screwed by slippage on the way up and you can actually sell before the trader you copied and get a better exit.

That’s my personal preference right now, but again it’s not 100% passive.

The concludes our analysis of manual trading vs copy trading. Let us know which you prefer in the comments below and remember, regardless of what you choose always trade responsibly.