Copy trading slippage and delay: why your fill differs

Copy trading slippage is the gap between the price you expected and the price you got, and in copy trading it is never zero, because your fill always lands after the trader's. Three things sit in that gap: the time it takes to see their trade, the price move their own buy caused, and the move your own order causes. Slippage tolerance is the setting that decides whether the trade still goes through once all three have happened.

Copy trading slippage, delay and price impact, defined

These three words get used as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the difference tells you which setting to change.

• Delay is the time between the trader's transaction landing and yours landing. It comes from detection, decision and the network.
• Price impact is how much an order moves the price by itself. On a thin memecoin pool, even a modest buy moves it.
• Slippage is how far the price may move against you between the quote and the fill. If the move is bigger than your tolerance, the transaction does not fill.

Why your copy trade price differs from the trader's

A copied buy pays more than the trader's buy for four stacked reasons, and only some of them are under your control.

1. Detection delay. A bot has to see the trade on-chain before it can act. copypump copies in real time, but your fill still comes after theirs.
2. The trader's own impact. Their buy lifted the price. On a young bonding curve the lift is steepest, as shown in what a big first buy does to a pump.fun price. You start from the price after their trade, not before.
3. Everyone else. Other copiers, snipers and manual buyers can land in between. On a hot coin, a few seconds is a lot of buyers.
4. Your own impact. Your order moves the pool too. The bigger your size relative to the pool, the more you pay for it.

On sells, the same logic runs in reverse: when a trader sells a large bag, their sell pushes the price down before yours lands. That is why a mirrored exit on a thin coin can come out below theirs.

A worked example, with illustrative numbers

The simplest way to see copy trade delay is to follow one buy. The figures below are made up to show the mechanics; they are not measurements of any tool.

Now apply the guards. With max chase at 10%, this copy is skipped: the price already ran further past the trader's entry than you allowed. With max chase at 25%, it is bought, about 16% above their average price. With slippage on Auto, the transaction is sent with enough tolerance to fill. If max impact were on at 1% and the pool were thin enough that your $50 moved it more than that, it would be skipped for that reason instead.

Same trader, same coin, three different outcomes, all decided by settings you chose in advance.

The four guards copypump uses

copypump has one guard for each part of the gap: late signal for delay, max chase for the run-up, max impact for your own order, and slippage for the fill.

Auto slippage starts at 30% and widens if the price keeps running, so the trade goes through. That sounds loose, and it is meant to be: slippage decides whether a trade fills, and max chase is what caps your entry. Splitting the two jobs means a fast coin does not turn into a string of failed transactions, while a coin that has already run too far is simply not bought.

How to tune for copy trade speed and price

Tune the guard that matches the problem you actually see, which the skip messages and your trade history tell you.

• Too many max chase skips means the wallet trades coins that run faster than your fills. Loosening max chase fills more copies, and some of them at the top of the candle the trader created. Sometimes the right answer is a slower wallet.
• Entries far above the trader's in 🧾 trade history (it shows the market cap at entry and exit) means your max chase is loose. Tighten it.
• Losing a lot on tiny pools points at your own impact. Turn max impact on, or lower your size. On, you stop paying for illiquidity and miss some of the smallest launches.
• Failed transactions on a fixed slippage mean the tolerance is too tight for how these coins move. Auto is there for that. More in why a pump.fun trade fails.

For a full starting profile with every setting, see the best copy trade settings for pump.fun.

What no setting can fix

No setting puts you in the trader's block. Copy trading always buys after the wallet you copy, and the wallets most worth copying are often the ones whose coins move fastest after they buy. Choosing wallets whose entries leave room behind them matters as much as any guard. Wallets that snipe the first seconds of a launch are the hardest to follow; the comparison is in copytrading vs sniping on pump.fun.