Why Your Copied Trade's Price Can Differ From the Trader's

Last checked against the product: 2026-10-19

The short answer

A copy is placed only after the trader's own fill has been seen, so it can never go out at the same moment. By then the market may have moved. Your copy can fill at a worse price than the trader got, or at a better one. Hypertide sets a limit on how much worse an opening copy may fill, and if the market has moved past it, the copy is not filled at all.

Why the price can differ

Hypertide watches the trader's account. When a fill shows up, it builds your copy from it, sized for your account, and sends it to Hyperliquid with your agent key. That takes time, and the order book can change in that time. A thin book can also run out of orders at the trader's price, so a copy has to take the next ones.

The limit on an opening copy

A copy that opens or adds to a position is sent as a market-style order with a worst price attached: the trader's fill price moved by a set number of basis points (one basis point is 0.01%) in the direction that hurts you. The order is immediate-or-cancel. That means it takes what the book offers up to that worst price right away, and whatever is left is cancelled instead of waiting in the book.

In the app's code the default for this limit is 50 basis points, or 0.50%. The deployment can change it, so the live value can differ. The Copier Gap page reads the value in use and shows it.

So a copy never fills at any price. If the book cannot fill it inside the limit, it fills partly or not at all. A partial fill is tracked at the size that really filled.

Closing is handled differently

A copy that closes a position uses a wider limit, 100 basis points (1.00%) by default. A close that does not fill is retried with a wider limit each time, up to 500 basis points (5.00%). The reason given in the code: a slightly worse exit price costs less than being stuck in a position the trader has already left. For a close, Hypertide first reads a fresh price from the book rather than relying on the trader's older fill price.

The fill notice for a close shows the price and result, but not the gap to the trader's price.

Where you see the difference

When an opening copy fills, the Telegram message shows your fill price and a line comparing it with the trader's fill, such as "3.0 bps worse", "2.0 bps better" or "matched". Both prices are real fills on Hyperliquid, so you can check them there.

Very small copies can be skipped

Hyperliquid refuses orders below a minimum size, about $10 by default in Hypertide's settings. A copy sized from a small account can fall under it. Hypertide first tries adding a whole size step to reach the minimum, but only if that stays within your daily cap. If it cannot, the copy is skipped, and you may get a notice. See hypertide.app/guides/why-no-copy-yet.

What the Copier Gap page counts

hypertide.app/copier-gap compares the traders on our board with a simulated copier on a fixed-size account. It runs over past fills only. It counts Hypertide's fee on each order that fills and skips orders below Hyperliquid's minimum. In that simulation the copier gets exactly the trader's price at the same moment. It leaves out Hyperliquid's own fees and funding too. The page says so, and that a real result can land above or below its figures.

So the page counts the effects of account size, fees and minimum order size. It does not count price differences like the ones in this guide, and it is not a record of what real copiers got.

What can still go wrong

A copy can fill at a worse price, fill only in part, or not fill. A followed trader can lose money, and so can you. This page gives no figure for how large the price difference usually is, because we have not measured one.

What this page does not tell you

It does not say whether to copy a trader. It describes the app as of 2026-10-19. The limits come from the app's settings and can change. More at hypertide.app/how and hypertide.app/fees.