Most of the time, every alert from a shot caller is the same size to you: your Max Capital Per Trade buys as many contracts as it buys, and that's the position. That works fine until the shot caller himself varies his size — and some of them do, deliberately.
Follow Publisher Sizing makes your entry track his. You'll find it on the Strategies page, in a strategy's Copy Trade tab, and it's off by default.
- Off — every entry from this source is sized the same, from your Max Capital Per Trade.
- On — each entry is scaled to how big he went. When he takes half a position, you take half your per-trade capital. When he doubles up, you take double.
How he tells us what "full size" means
He records, per ticker, what a full position looks like for him. There's no single number that works across the board — 30 contracts is an ordinary SPY position and an enormous one in a $500 stock — so it's kept one ticker at a time.
Your entry is then that alert's contract count read against his own baseline for that ticker, as a fraction:
| His baseline | He sent | You take |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 30 | a full position — your Max Capital Per Trade |
| 30 | 15 | half of it |
| 30 | 60 | double it |
| 30 | 29 | a full position — small differences aren't a signal |
A count close to his baseline counts as a full position. Someone who normally does 30 and sends 29 didn't mean a 3% smaller trade.
Example
Your Max Capital Per Trade is $2,000 and a $2.00 contract means 10 contracts at full size. He normally does 5 SPY contracts and this alert says 2 — so you take 4 contracts, about $800. The next alert says 10, double his normal, and you take 20 contracts, about $4,000.
Yes, a double-size entry spends more than your cap
That's the whole point of following his sizing, and averaging already does the same thing — a second entry on a position you're already holding spends more than your per-trade cap too.
Two things still hold the total down:
- Nothing is ever scaled beyond 2x, in either direction — the smallest is a quarter position, the largest is double. Even if a baseline were recorded wrongly, a single alert can't run away with your account.
- Your Max Contracts cap and your available buying power still apply afterwards. If capital or that cap only allows 12 contracts, you get 12, not 20.
Warning
If you turn this on, size your Max Capital Per Trade on the understanding that a single entry can be twice it. Set the cap to half of what you're willing to have in one trade, not all of it.
Where you might not see it
The switch only appears when the shot caller has actually recorded his baselines. Without them there's no "full size" to compare an alert against, so there'd be nothing for the setting to do. Most sources don't use it.
It's saved per strategy, so you can run one strategy following his sizing and another at a fixed size on the same source.
What it doesn't change
- Which trades you take. Your filters, trading hours and daily limits all decide that, exactly as before.
- Your exits. Take-profit, stop-loss and trailing are untouched — this is purely about how many contracts go on.
- Spreads. A spread already copies his exact contract count, so there's nothing to scale.
- Futures. Futures strategies size from a fixed contract setting, where a capital multiplier means nothing.
Trying it first
You can measure the difference before committing to it: the switch is also on the Backtest page's Position tab for any source that offers it. Run the same window twice, once with it off and once on, and the results tell you whether following his sizing helped or hurt. The note under your results also says how many of the trades were actually scaled — on a source that rarely varies, the answer can be "none", and then the setting isn't worth thinking about.