Source: https://whitepips.com/blog/expert-advisors-and-copy-trading-on-funded-accounts Summary: Your own EA on MT5 is allowed on every CFD plan, and so is copy trading between your own accounts. Which bots and signals are banned, and how the desk decides. Last updated: 2026-10-28 # MT5 expert advisors and copy trading on a funded account What a prop firm allows: your own EA and copying between your own accounts. Which bots and signal services are banned, and how the risk desk decides. - October 6, 2026 - 7 min read - 8 sections - Risk **In this article 8** 1. Your own EA is allowed on every CFD plan 2. Which bots are banned 3. Copying between your own accounts 4. Signal services and account managers are banned 5. How the desk detects it 6. What the desk decides 7. How to document your own EA 8. Questions traders ask Back to top October 6, 2026 7 min read Risk ## Key takeaways 1. **Your own EA is allowed on every CFD plan.** An expert advisor is allowed if you genuinely developed it, own it and control it, and can show it running. 2. **Which bots are banned.** Anything you did not build and do not control. 3. **Copying between your own accounts.** Copy trading is allowed in one direction only: from you to you. 4. **Signal services and account managers are banned.** The other direction, from someone else to you, is banned on every plan. 5. **How the desk detects it.** The risk desk does not watch screens. On a funded account you may run an expert advisor you built yourself, and you may copy your own trading between your own accounts. That is the whole of what is allowed. Bought, rented, subscription or mass-market bots are banned on every plan, and so are signal services, shared master accounts, account managers and anyone who passes a challenge for you. The rule is the same in the evaluation and once funded, on every CFD plan, and the copy-trading rule covers the futures line too. It is written in the [trading rules](https://whitepips.com/legal/trading-rules) , and when a firm's EA rule says "own EAs only", this is what it means in practice. The rest of this article explains where the line is, how the risk desk sees your trading, what happens when a finding is raised, and how to document an EA so that a review takes a day rather than a month. ## Your own EA is allowed on every CFD plan An expert advisor is allowed if you genuinely developed it, own it and control it, and can show it running. The test is not whether it is profitable or how fast it trades; it is whether it is yours. An EA you wrote in MQL5 over a year of evenings qualifies. An EA a developer wrote to your specification, which you own outright and can change, qualifies. A strategy you built in a visual EA builder from your own rules qualifies, if you can explain each rule. MetaTrader 5 runs the EA on your machine or your VPS; the account does not care. Charts, indicators and EAs carry over to any MT5 account, and the CFD plan pages list expert advisors as allowed on Edge, Instant and Prime. On futures, the trade copier is allowed under the same ownership rule. What is not required: telling the firm in advance, registering the EA, or trading it in a particular way. What is required: being able to show it, explain it and demonstrate it when asked. ## Which bots are banned Anything you did not build and do not control. In practice that is: - Bought EAs, including a one-off licence from a marketplace. - Rented or subscription EAs, where the logic stays with the vendor and your access ends when you stop paying. - Mass-market plug-and-play bots sold to many traders on the promise of passing evaluations. - "Prop firm passing" EAs, whatever they trade and however slowly. - Any EA whose trades are decided on a server you do not own, even if your account places them. It does not matter how the bot trades. A banned EA that scalps and a banned EA that holds for days are banned for the same reason: the firm is funding a trader, and the trader it would be funding is the vendor. One vendor's bot running on hundreds of accounts across many firms is also the main way firms are drained by correlated positions, which is why every firm worth trading with has the same rule. If you cannot change the EA's entry logic yourself, treat it as not yours. Being able to adjust a lot size or a time filter in the inputs is not control of the strategy. ## Copying between your own accounts Copy trading is allowed in one direction only: from you to you. You may copy between your own WhitePips accounts, CFD with CFD and futures with futures, and the dashboard has a copy-trading feature for exactly that. You may also copy from a master account that is genuinely yours at another broker or another firm, for example a personal live account whose trades you want mirrored onto a funded one. The master must be yours in the same sense as the EA: your name, your decisions, your control. A trader with three funded accounts who places each trade once and copies it to the other two is doing what the rule is for. The post on [position sizing against a loss limit](https://whitepips.com/blog/sizing-against-the-limit) is worth reading before you do it, because a copied trade sized for a $100K account can breach the daily limit on a $25K account in the same move. ## Signal services and account managers are banned The other direction, from someone else to you, is banned on every plan. That covers: - Signal services, paid or free, including MQL5 signals subscribed to inside MetaTrader. - Shared master accounts, where one account's trades are copied to many traders' funded accounts. - Account managers, whether a friend with a login or a company with a contract. - Challenge-passing services that trade the evaluation for you and hand back a funded account. - Copying another trader's funded account, even with their consent and even if you both pass. The last two are the ones traders argue about. A funded account is issued to a verified person on the strength of that person's trading; the payouts go to that person only. If someone else traded it, the firm has funded someone it has never verified, and every account in that chain is involved. Identity verification before credentials are issued is partly there to make this clear from the start. ## How the desk detects it The risk desk does not watch screens. It runs detectors over the trading data of every account and raises a finding with evidence when a pattern matches. Three patterns are relevant here. The first is a mass EA: one MetaTrader magic number placing orders for several different traders. Every EA stamps its orders with a magic number, and a vendor's bot carries the same one onto every account it is sold to. When three or more unrelated traders show orders with the same magic number and the same timing, the detector raises a finding. Your own EA has a magic number no one else uses. The second is copying: the same trades, in the same symbols, at the same seconds, across accounts that belong to different verified people. Copying between your own accounts matches the same pattern but the accounts share an owner, which is why that is permitted and the other is not. The third is third-party signals: orders that MetaTrader itself marks as coming from an MQL5 signal subscription. There is no ambiguity in those. > A finding is evidence, not a verdict. The detectors raise it; the desk decides, and nothing is automatic. ## What the desk decides Consequences are a decision of the risk desk, never a script. When a finding is raised the desk looks at the evidence, may ask you for the EA, its logic or a demonstration, and then chooses from a short list: remove the profit of the trades concerned, hold a payout until the review is done, or close the account. On a repeat finding, every account named in it is treated together. That gives you a real chance to answer. A trader who can open a screen share and show the EA running from their own source code, explain why it entered a given trade and point at the magic number in their code is usually finished in one exchange. A trader who says the EA is theirs but cannot show the code or explain the logic is not. The post on [how evaluations are actually lost](https://whitepips.com/blog/how-evaluations-are-lost) covers the other, more common ways to lose an account; this one is entirely avoidable. ## How to document your own EA Do this before you need it. The point is to make "it is mine" a fact you can show in ten minutes rather than a claim you have to argue. 1. Keep the source. The .mq5 file, with a version history if you have one, not only the compiled .ex5. A repository with dated commits is the strongest evidence there is. 2. Write a one-page description of the logic: what it looks at, when it enters, when it exits, how it sizes. If you cannot write this page, the desk will reach the same conclusion. 3. Give it a magic number of your own and note it. Avoid defaults like 12345 or 0; they are shared with half the internet. 4. Keep the Experts and Journal tabs. MetaTrader logs every order the EA sends; a log from your own terminal matching the account history is hard to fake and easy to show. 5. If a developer wrote it for you, keep the contract or invoice that gives you ownership of the code, and make sure you can change it without them. 6. Be ready to demonstrate. A short screen share of the EA attached to a chart on your terminal, placing a trade that then appears in the account, settles most reviews on the spot. None of this is paperwork for its own sake. The same list is what any serious trader keeps anyway, because an EA you cannot explain is an EA you cannot fix when it breaks. ## Questions traders ask **Can I run my own EA on MT5 at WhitePips?** Yes, on every CFD plan. Edge, Instant and Prime accounts trade on [MetaTrader 5](https://whitepips.com/platforms) , and each publishes expert advisors and trade copiers as permitted, on the ownership conditions above. Futures accounts trade on Volumetrica and publish a trade copier but not expert advisors, so automated trading is not permitted on futures unless the Plan Specification says otherwise ([Trading Rules, section 13](https://whitepips.com/legal/trading-rules#automation) ). **Can I use a bought EA if I change its settings?** No. Changing inputs is not control of the strategy. If the logic was written and is owned by a vendor, it is a bought EA whatever the settings. **Can I copy my funded account from my own live account at another broker?** Yes, if the master is genuinely yours. Copy CFD to CFD, size for the smaller account's limits, and keep proof that the master account is in your name. **Will an EA breach be automatic?** No. A detector raises a finding with evidence and the risk desk decides, after asking you for the EA, its logic or a demonstration if it needs to. The outcome ranges from nothing, through removing the trades' profit or holding a payout, to closing the account. More in Risk [The consistency rule explained, with examples](https://whitepips.com/blog/consistency-rule-explained) [Drawdown recovery: why a 10% loss needs 11.1% back](https://whitepips.com/blog/drawdown-recovery-maths) [Hedging on a prop account: what is allowed](https://whitepips.com/blog/hedging-on-a-prop-account) [Read next Max exposure and max floating loss: two rules to watch Risk ยท 7 min read](https://whitepips.com/blog/max-exposure-and-floating-loss) Educational content, not financial advice. Trading carries risk and most people who attempt an evaluation do not pass it. 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