These are all great points and should be issues to consider whether trading alone or trading for others.
Here’s a more nuanced point that highlights the real problem for C2. As noted before, many strategy managers are executing trades that last only a few minutes, which is less than or comparable to the copy-trading delay time of the C2 platform (particularly for futures). This can put the strategy manager’s model portfolio in opposing positions to his or her subscribers for some minutes at a time. If the strategy manager executes opposing trades just after the C2 trading delay time, he or she will capture the market effect of clients’ delayed trades, effectively front running the subscribers and potentially leading to harmful results for them.
I don’t see any way around this except for trading discipline (i.e. reducing trading frequency to minimize the market front running effect). I don’t think it’s fair to label this effect as mere ‘slippage’ when the strategy manager is trading in a manner that can harvest the market action of the subscribers’ delayed trades, whether intentional or not.
