Four products, four setup screens, four words for the same field: Master, Provider, Leader, Strategy. None of the labels tell you what the software does, and two of them mean something different from what you assume. Here is the vocabulary, sorted.
Open four copier setup screens side by side. The first asks for a Master account. The second asks for a Provider. The third calls it a Leader. The fourth calls it a Strategy. All four fields want the same thing: the login of the account whose trades are to be read.
Now open their feature comparison tables. Nothing lines up, because the words are doing marketing work rather than technical work. Someone evaluating three products cannot tell whether they are being offered the same mechanism under different labels or genuinely different mechanisms.
This is a glossary written to fix that. It is also, along the way, an answer to a question people search for directly: what does "master copy" actually mean in trading.
The phrase arrives from outside trading. A master copy is the authoritative original from which duplicates are made — a master tape, a master document. Carried into trading, it becomes three separate ideas that share a name:
They all describe the same asymmetry: one account originates, another reproduces. What they do not describe is anything you can rely on. None of these labels tells you how sizing works, whether partial closes travel, or what happens on a reconnect.
The industry has been retiring master and slave as a pair for several years, following a broader shift across software and engineering documentation. There is a social argument for that, which is well rehearsed elsewhere. There is also a technical argument, and in this specific domain the technical argument is the stronger one.
The older pair describes a receiving account as obedient. Modern replication is nothing of the sort. A follower account:
An account that resizes, filters, refuses and halts is not a subordinate copy of anything. It is a second account applying a policy to a stream of information. Provider and Follower describes that accurately, which is why our own product uses those terms and why this article does. The older pair is defined here once so that you can read older documentation, and then set aside.
This is where real money gets lost, because some of these are legally different structures rather than different words.
Copy trading. Positions are reproduced on your own account, in your name, under your control. You can close anything at any time. Your broker relationship is yours.
Mirror trading. Historically, following a pre-defined algorithmic strategy from a menu rather than following a person. In current usage it is often used interchangeably with copy trading, so treat the word as a hint rather than a definition and check the mechanism.
Social trading. A platform layer over copy trading — leaderboards, public statistics, followers, commentary. The copying mechanism underneath may be perfectly ordinary; the social layer changes the incentives on the provider side, sometimes considerably.
Signal service. Someone publishes trade ideas. Execution is yours, whether by hand or through a signal copier. No account of yours is connected to theirs. This is a publishing relationship, not a technical one. For the record, it is not what we do — we build the execution software, not the signals.
PAMM, MAM and LAMM. These are not copy trading, and the distinction is the important one on this list. In a percentage-allocation or multi-account manager structure, a manager trades a pooled or aggregated allocation, and your money sits inside that structure under an agreement. Allocation happens at the broker level rather than by reproducing orders on an account you control. The regulatory position, the manager's authority over your funds and your ability to exit are all materially different from copy trading. If a service describes itself with both vocabularies in the same paragraph, find out which one is legally true before funding it.
Drop copy. A read-only duplicate stream of order and execution activity, used for monitoring, risk and reconciliation. It does not place trades. Retail traders often use the phrase loosely to mean "a copy of my trades somewhere else", which is close enough to cause confusion and far enough to matter.
WARNING
"Managed account" and "copy trading" are sometimes used for the same offer. They are not the same thing. In one, you hold the positions. In the other, someone else does, on your behalf, under an agreement you should read in full.
Having sorted the words, the practical point: the vocabulary on a product page is not evidence of anything. Whatever pair a tool uses, the same short list of questions decides whether it is any good.
Every one of those is testable on demo in an afternoon. None of them is answered by whether the field is labelled Master or Provider.
TIP
When you are comparing tools, rewrite each product's feature list into your own vocabulary before you compare them. Half the apparent differences disappear, and the ones that survive are the real ones.
If you produce content, documentation or support material in this space, pick one pair and use it everywhere — including in your interface labels, your logs and your error messages. A tool whose setup screen says Provider, whose logs say master, and whose support articles say leader is a tool that will generate support tickets about nothing but terminology.
We use Provider and Follower. Not because the older words are unreadable, but because they describe what the accounts actually do, and because a person reading a log line at 03:00 should not have to translate.
For what the two roles mean operationally — what replicates, what never does, and why a manual trade behaves differently depending on which side it is placed on — see /blog/signal-providers-and-followers. And for the institutional term that keeps getting mixed into this one, /blog/what-is-drop-copy explains what a drop copy really is and how it relates to trade copying.
