Why Your Account Doesn’t Match the Published Results

The strategy posts a gain for the month. Your account shows less, or even a loss. Before anyone concludes that somebody is lying, walk through the four mechanics that explain the gap. All four are checkable.

This is the most common question in copy trading, and it deserves a straight answer: in almost every case, both numbers are true. The published result is the master account’s result for the full period. Your result is your account’s result for the window you were actually connected, minus what the arrangement costs. Those are answers to two different questions. This article explains, in plain terms, why they differ, and how to check the real number for yourself instead of taking anyone’s word for it, including ours.

1. You boarded the bus mid-route

A copied account only copies trades placed after it connects. Nothing that happened before your connect date belongs to you. Not the gains, and not the losses.

A bus route covers a hundred miles in a day. If you get on at the halfway stop, you travel fifty miles. The route map still says one hundred, and the map is not wrong. It describes the whole route, and you were only on the bus for half of it.

A monthly figure on a track record describes accounts that were connected for the whole month. If you connected on the 18th, you received whatever the strategy did from the 18th onward. That might be the strong half of the month, the flat half, or the losing half. An illustrative example, using round numbers invented to show the mechanism: a strategy finishes a month up 8 percent, but 5 of those points were earned in the first two weeks. An account that connected mid-month captures roughly 3 points, not 8. Same strategy, same month, both numbers true.

In plain words: your account starts counting from the day you connect, not from the first of the month.

2. Switching strategies resets your window

The same logic applies with more force when you move between strategies. Suppose, illustratively again, that strategy A has a losing stretch and you move your funds to strategy B in the middle of the month. Your account now carries A’s realised loss plus only a partial month of B. At month end, B’s published record shows its full-month gain. Your account shows A’s loss and B’s partial gain netted together. Nothing dishonest happened; your account simply lived a different sequence than either published record.

This is also why two people in the same strategy can hold different balances: they connected on different dates, from different starting points, sometimes via different routes. No two accounts follow the same path through the same market unless they started at the same time and place.

3. Know what the published number already includes

Many people get this detail backwards. A verified track record tracked on the live trading account is calculated from that account’s equity. Trading costs such as commission, spread, and swap (the overnight financing amount on positions held past the daily rollover) are charged inside that account as it trades, so a live, verified monthly figure already has those costs baked in. It is not a marketing number with the costs hidden underneath it.

What usually does sit between the published figure and your statement is the performance fee: the share of profits paid to the trader, charged after the profit is made. An illustrative example, with invented round numbers: a strategy publishes an 8 percent month and the arrangement carries a 30 percent performance fee. A member connected for the whole month keeps 8 minus 30 percent of 8, which is about 5.6 percent. That difference is real, knowable, and boring. Get the fee schedule in writing and you can work out your net in advance, every single month. Any provider worth your time will hand it over without being chased.

In plain words: a live verified record has already paid the trading costs. Usually the only slice still to come out of your share is the performance fee, and you can know its size before the month starts.

4. Percentages feel different at different sizes

This one is pure psychology, and it catches almost everyone. An illustrative 4 percent month is 20 dollars on a 500-dollar account and 4,000 dollars on a 100,000-dollar account. The strategy did exactly the same job for both. One account holder is pleased; the other wonders whether anything happened at all.

Judge performance in percent, not in dollars. Dollars measure the size of your account. Percent measures the quality of the work. If the percent is sound, the dollars follow as the account grows. That is the entire argument for patience, and we have made it before in our honest answer on whether copy trading is profitable: you do not get the strategy’s result, you get the result of the window you were present for, at the size you were present with.

Both numbers are true. Reconcile them before you conclude anything.

How to check the real number yourself

None of the above requires trust. It can all be verified, which is the point of insisting on a third-party record in the first place.

• Open the strategy’s verified track record. A Myfxbook record connected to the master account, with verified track record and trading privileges, is the reference document. Not a screenshot, and not a chat message. Our line-by-line guide to reading a Myfxbook record walks through every field.
• Find the monthly table and locate your connect date. The record shows the result by month. Compare what the strategy did from your connect date with what your own statement shows. That is the like-for-like comparison; the full-month figure is not.
• Apply the performance fee before judging the gap. Take the published figure for your window, subtract the performance fee from the fee schedule you have in writing, and the remainder should reconcile with your statement to within normal slippage. Remember that a record tracked on the live account already includes the trading costs.
• Judge over a longer window. A single week is weather; a quarter starts to be climate. Markets also breathe unevenly through the year. Late summer, for instance, often brings thinner volume and flatter charts, so any single month, good or bad, is a poor measuring stick on its own.
• Treat a record with no losing days as a warning, not a feature. Real trading in real markets has losing trades and losing days. A record that only ever wins, in identical increments, is one of the classic marks of a fabricated one. Our red-flags checklist for verified vs unverified results covers the rest.

If you walk through those five steps and the numbers still do not reconcile, ask the provider to reconcile them line by line, and expect a specific answer, not a story. That is a fair test to run on anyone, including us.

The honest summary

A gap between the published result and your account is not, by itself, evidence of anything wrong. It is usually the arithmetic of when you connected, what you moved between, the performance fee, and how large your account is. All four are knowable. Learn to run the reconciliation once and you will never again need to take a screenshot’s word, or ours, for how your month actually went.

This article is educational and is not financial advice, a recommendation, or an offer. Trading foreign exchange and CFDs carries a substantial risk of loss, including the loss of your entire investment, and losses are a common outcome. All figures shown above are illustrative examples used to explain a mechanism. They are not results, projections, or typical outcomes of any Sterling Capital strategy, and fee arrangements vary. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Consider your circumstances and seek independent professional advice where appropriate.