Follow

"Follow" describes a way of learning from someone else's trades without copying them directly. When a trader follows a called trade — meaning another trader, often in a chatroom or alert service, announces a trade they are taking — the follower watches what happens: the setup that triggered the entry, where the trader got in, where they placed a stop (an order to exit if the trade moves against them), and why they eventually got out. The follower does not automatically place the same trade with the same size at the same moment.

The point of following is to absorb the reasoning behind a trade rather than the trade itself. Two traders can look at the same called trade and take completely different actions: one might skip it because it doesn't fit their risk tolerance, another might take a smaller size, and a third might use it purely as a case study to review after the market closes. Over time, the idea is that a follower builds their own trading style, informed by other traders' decision-making but adapted to their own account size, experience level, and comfort with risk.

This is usually contrasted with "mirroring," where someone copies a called trade's entry, size, and exit as closely as possible in real time. Following is slower and more deliberate; mirroring is faster and more mechanical. Beginners are often encouraged to follow first, because blindly mirroring trades without understanding them can lead to confusion when a mirrored trade goes wrong and the follower has no framework for why.

The nuance that trips people up is that "following" a trader in a chatroom sense (like following an account on social media) is different from "following" a called trade in this strategy sense. In this glossary's usage, following specifically means the deliberate, educational act of studying someone else's trade logic before deciding independently whether and how to act.