cTrader Copy vs MQL5 Signals: two ways to price a track record

Copy trading has a public face — the social feeds, the leaderboards — and a plumbing layer underneath, on marketplaces run inside the terminals by the companies that wrote them. Two of them are cTrader Copy and MQL5 Signals, MetaQuotes’ service for MetaTrader 4 and 5. They sell the same good — automated access to a stranger’s account — and price it in opposite directions.

The two rulebooks, as published

Two ways to bill

cTrader lists three fee types, which its page says providers set themselves; nothing on it says they are alternatives rather than a stack. One is contingent on the copier making money: a performance fee on net profit under a high-water mark, which stops a provider being paid twice for recovering lost ground. The other two are contingent on nothing: a management fee accrues daily against equity whether the month was good or ruinous, and a volume fee is charged as a copied position opens and closes, paying the provider for trading more — the churn conflict, priced.

MQL5 uses one instrument: a flat subscription fee, charged in full for the whole period on subscribing, per its published rules. Simplicity is a virtue in a fee schedule, but a flat fee takes no interest in the outcome: the same on the month the copied account doubles and the month it halves, and not refunded on cancellation. A subscription is billed in advance and a drawdown settled in arrears; both invoices are addressed to the copier.

What Reliability is published to mean

MQL5’s tiles carry a metric called Reliability, and readers arrive expecting a number. On the tiles read on 29 August 2026, none was printed: Reliability is drawn as a five-segment bar, while the percentage beside it belongs to a different field — Algo trading, the share of trades placed by an Expert Advisor. A figure lifted off a tile and quoted as a reliability score is the wrong statistic.

The hover text on that bar carries MetaQuotes’ own definition: Reliability “evaluates the risks of the signal relative to other ones in %”, the higher the value the more reliable the signal. A percentage exists, then; the tile just does not print it. MetaQuotes has published what the number is made of, too: the release note announcing the metric on metatrader5.com in October 2017 calls it an aggregate of multiple parameters, reduced when a signal carries a large load on the deposit or a large jump in monthly growth. What it does not publish is the arithmetic joining them, which is no scandal; few platforms publish scoring formulas. But an aggregate of undisclosed weights, shown as a bar, is a comparison aid rather than a measurement.

Percentages need denominators

Each MQL5 tile pairs its growth figure with the year it counts from, producing numbers on incompatible axes: growth since 2021 beside growth since 2026. cTrader’s headline states one superlative instead: 117 per cent top monthly ROI, as displayed on its Copy page on 29 August 2026. Its own tooltip calls that a value based on the historical performance of top strategies, with past performance no guarantee of future results — a fact about survivors rather than about the shelf. We have set out why displayed returns flatter; both are textbook cases.

Denominators are the other half. One signal in the popular-among-subscribers rail displayed growth of 2,099 per cent since 2021; its statistics page, read the same day, recorded an initial deposit of 1,000 dollars, withdrawals of 3,850 dollars and equity of 1,066.10 dollars. MetaQuotes conceals none of that — balance, equity, deposits and withdrawals are published live — but a four-figure ratio on a small account is a different object from the same ratio on a large one.

Who decides whether you may copy

On cTrader, neither the copier nor the marketplace. The page states that availability varies by broker, jurisdiction and regulatory status, and that for retail clients of certain EU/EEA regulated brokers copy trading may be restricted, demo-only or absent. Neither operator describes its marketplace as a regulated investment service, and we make no claim beyond the disclaimers each publishes. MQL5’s constraint is mechanical: copying runs in the terminal, which the rules require to be always connected to the server — and the same site sells the low-latency VPS that keeps it there.

Verdict

Assessed against both marketplaces’ published pages on 29 August 2026; every figure was current only on the day it was read. We are not licensed advisers, and nothing above recommends any marketplace or provider. The arithmetic surviving both schedules is plain: the fee is charged whether or not the copied trades work, while the losses mirror into the subscriber’s account at full size. A track record describes a past that owes the future nothing.