Copy trading is profitable for a minority of the people doing it. Across the 20 Telegram signal channels with enough TTMT traders to publish a figure, 58 of 137 trader-channel results were in profit over the 90 days to 14 September 2026, which is 42%. On live and prop-firm accounts it was 19 of 51, or 37%. Over the same population, the median channel closed 68% of its trades in profit.
Those last two numbers are the whole subject. The channels win most of their trades. Most of the people following them still end the quarter down, and the gap between the two is not a mystery.
Where these numbers come from
TTMT is a copier: it reads a signal from a Telegram channel and places the trade on the user's own MetaTrader account. That means we can measure something the industry mostly guesses at, which is what happened to the followers rather than what the provider posted.
Every figure here was pulled from our public Explore data on 14 September 2026.
| Population, 90 days to 2026-09-14 | Traders in profit | Total | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| All account types | 58 | 137 | 42% |
| Live and prop-firm accounts only | 19 | 51 | 37% |
| Demo accounts only | 48 | 98 | 49% |
Definitions, because every one of these words is doing work.
A trader in profit is a distinct TTMT user whose closed trades on one channel sum above zero over the window. Each person counts once per channel regardless of how many trades they took or how large. Someone who follows three channels appears three times, which is why I call them trader-channel results rather than people.
The live and demo rows are the same calculation run on each account type separately. A trader who runs both appears in both.
Channels with fewer than three traders in the window are hidden completely rather than published as a percentage of two people. That floor is why 20 channels qualify out of the 66 currently listed, and the 46 that do not are mostly channels nobody on TTMT has traded much lately.
P&L is summed in each account's own currency and never converted, so a trader running accounts in two currencies is added up as-is.
Why 68% of trades win and 42% of traders don't
A win rate counts trades. Profit counts money. Nothing forces those to agree, and in this business they usually do not.
The shape of the average signal. Most channels post several take-profit levels and one stop, and the stop is further away than the first target. Bank a small piece at TP1 four times, take the full stop once, and the win rate reads 80% while the balance goes down. Fourteen of the 20 channels win 60% or more of their trades; nine of those fourteen still have most of their followers under water.
The gap between the message and the fill. The signal is a description of a trade. The trade you get depends on how fast you acted, what price you took inside the entry zone, and what size you chose. Two people following the same channel on the same day can end the month twenty per cent apart, and I have measured what that gap costs in pips.
Position sizing. A fixed lot size on a channel whose stop distance varies means your real risk per trade swings without you choosing it. The trades that lose most are the ones with the widest stops, which under fixed lots are also the ones you sized as though they were narrow.
The drawdown you have to sit through. Half of the 20 channels put their median trader through a peak-to-trough fall of more than 11% on that channel alone, and six of them more than 20%. People do not sit through that calmly. They cut size after a loss and raise it after a win, which is the reverse of what the arithmetic needs.
Why live accounts do worse than demo
37% of live and prop traders were in profit against 49% on demo, on the same channels in the same window.
I would not read that as demo traders being better. Two plainer explanations fit. Money changes behaviour: the same person overrides a trade with rent on the line and lets it run on a demo. And demo accounts are often opened to test a channel for a week, so a good week shows up as a profitable demo trader and a bad one gets abandoned before it accumulates.
What the split does tell you is that a channel's demo figures are not a forecast of what your live account will do. When a channel shows both, the live number is the one that describes your situation.
What the spread across channels says
The 20 channels do not sit in a cluster around 42%. They spread out:
- 2 channels had none of their traders in profit
- 9 had a third or fewer
- 4 sat between a third and half
- 5 had more than half, two of those every trader
So channel choice matters, and it matters less than people hope. A channel where most followers are up is worth finding. A channel where most followers are down is worth avoiding regardless of its posted win rate, which is exactly the number you cannot see from inside the Telegram room.
What I cannot tell you from this data
Whether the profitable traders configured anything differently. Our numbers say who ended up in profit, not what settings they ran, and I am not going to infer a causal story out of 137 results to sell you a feature.
Whether 90 days is long enough to judge a channel. It is not, really. It is long enough to notice a channel whose followers are all losing, which is a different and more useful thing.
Whether this generalises beyond TTMT users. These are people who chose to automate their copying, on a platform that defaults to percentage-based sizing and lets you halt on a daily loss. A room full of manual copiers might do better or worse. I would guess worse, and a guess is all that is.
The things that are in your control
None of the following makes a losing channel profitable. They stop a profitable channel from becoming a loss on your account, which is a narrower claim and the only honest one.
Size on risk, not on lots. One per cent of the account, solved from that signal's own stop distance, in your account currency. Percentage sizing is the single setting that changes the distribution of your outcomes most.
Use the entry zone. When a provider posts a range, a layered entry spreads your fills across it instead of taking the worst end of their own range.
Protect the winners. Breakeven automation moves the stop to entry when the first target is reached, which removes the specific failure where a trade goes 40 pips your way overnight and closes red.
Cap the day. A daily loss limit that halts trading, per account, ends the sequence where one bad morning becomes a bad quarter.
Follow fewer channels than you think. Three gold channels in the same session is one position sized three times. The follower who is down 30% is usually the one holding four correlated trades they counted as four separate bets.
How to check a channel before you follow it
Open its page in Explore. Look at the share of its traders in profit before you look at its win rate, and look at the live figure rather than the combined one if you intend to trade live. Then read the methodology, which says what each number counts and what it leaves out.
For channels ranked side by side on executed trades rather than testimonials, the gold channel rankings are the shortest version of that exercise. Gold is the only market with enough channels past the sample minimum today.
And if you are choosing tools rather than channels, copying Telegram signals into MT5 covers what has to happen between the message and the fill for any of this to work.
The short answer
Copy trading is profitable for roughly four followers in ten over a quarter, on a small sample of channels that mostly win their trades. The difference between the followers who are up and the ones who are not shows up in sizing, timing and how long they hold on, not in the quality of the calls.
If you are currently flat while your provider posts winners, stop auditing the provider. The leak is almost certainly on your side of the message, and that is the side you can fix.
Not financial advice. Past results do not predict future results. Every figure above is a record of what happened on TTMT accounts in one 90-day window, on a small sample, and it will look different next quarter.
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