Tradovate Copy Trading: One Entry on Every Futures Account
Tradovate powers a huge share of retail futures and prop trading. Here's how copy trading works on it: connect with OAuth, trade the leader, and every account follows — entries, exits and risk.
Tradovate sits under a remarkable amount of modern futures trading — its own brokerage accounts, NinjaTrader's cloud accounts, and the evaluation accounts of several prop firms all run on the same infrastructure. Which makes it the natural place to copy trades between futures accounts: one API surface, real-time events, proper order routing.
This is how MirrorChain does it, end to end.
Connecting: OAuth, not passwords
You connect Tradovate (or NinjaTrader — same backend) through the official OAuth flow: click Connect Futures on the Connections page, approve access on Tradovate's own login page, and your accounts register automatically. MirrorChain never sees your password; tokens are stored encrypted and refreshed automatically.
Real-time copying, both directions of the trade
A Tradovate leader account streams position events over a live socket, so an entry on the leader reaches members in real time — not on a polling delay. Members receive the same product and direction, sized to their own balance in whole contracts.
Exits are propagated explicitly: when the leader flattens — manual close, stop, target, or liquidation — each member's matching position (same product, same direction) closes on its own account. A member's opposite-direction hedge is never touched.
Mixing platforms in one group
Copy groups aren't limited to one venue. A Tradovate leader can drive NinjaTrader members, TopstepX members, and even futures-class MT5 accounts in the same group — the copier maps the product per platform. The one rule MirrorChain enforces strictly: futures accounts and CFD accounts never mix in one group, because a micro future and a CFD on the 'same' market are different instruments with different risk. More on that split in the prop-firm guide.
Per-account protection
Every connected account gets its own risk rails: daily loss limit with automatic lock-and-flatten, profit target, and session locks. Because enforcement runs server-side, an account is protected even when your machine is asleep — the poller watches positions and enforces limits continuously.
Charts, floating P&L and the trading journal work for futures accounts the same as everywhere else: every closed round-trip lands in the journal automatically with its realized P&L, so the analytics stay honest across venues.
Getting started
Connect a Tradovate demo first if you want to see the flow risk-free — the whole pipeline behaves identically on demo accounts. Then build your group, set each account's risk limits, and trade the leader as you normally would. Plans and account limits are on the pricing page.