Some thoughts that might be useful for folks who are new to copy trading

You won’t find any referral links or recommendations for services or copy trading bots here.

Just some thoughts from my experience that might be useful for folks who are new to copy trading.
I apologize in advance, but it’s a little bit technical. I’ll try to explain in a way that’s easier for non-tech folks to understand.

TL;DR:
You should spend 99% of your time on wallet recon (collecting, filtering, and analyzing), rather than on choosing, setting up, and discussing copy trading bots. None of the features advertised by copy trading bots matter until you have the right wallets to follow, and this is the most time consuming and difficult part of copy trading.

One example:
1. Go to any copy trading bot and find its fee address, in the bot’s documentation, Solscan transactions, etc.;
2. Use this address to fetch all transfer transactions from the last week. For example, you can use the Helius Enhanced Transactions API or a similar service;
3. Get all the wallets from these transactions. Check their P&L, Win Rate, and median ROI using GMGN, WalletX or another service;
4. You will see that 95% of them are not profitable.

Once again, it doesn’t matter which bot or what settings you use until you find the right wallets.

I think I’m pretty good at wallet recon. I’ve built my own pipeline for it (I won’t share it here). However, I’ll share some thoughts that might be useful to you:

1. You must spend hours looking for profitable wallets. It’s almost impossible to do manually, so you have to build your own pipeline. A simple starting scenario is to subscribe to the most popular programs (use dune or similar to check the volume of these programs). Fetch and monitor their SWAP transactions, and then get the wallets. Next, analyze the wallets (P&L, WinRate), and filter out token creators, rugs, arbitrage bots, and copy traders. There are many APIs for this, some of which have free tiers. You can also subscribe (wss://) to these program transactions and collect wallets in real time. It’s pretty expensive, by the way.
2. You can grab the wallets from some services without using their API, use Playwright and scrap them from Dune tables, DexScreener history, etc. Respect the rate-limiting and add stealth plugins to your setup.
3. Forget about GMGN top wallets like Cupsey until you have your own RPC node with an 80%+ chance of landing your swap transaction in the same block as them. Otherwise, you will be used as exit liquidity and lose your money.
4. Most profitable wallets stop making swaps after some time, so you should always follow them manually or subscribe to their transactions. Some wallets are easy to follow; they simply withdraw their money to another wallet (like orchestrator), from which they deposit to other wallets for a couple of days of trading. Some wallets (most of them) withdraw their money to CEX wallets, and it’s not possible to trace them after that. Once you’ve built a healthy relationship with a successful wallet, don’t let it go. Stalk it constantly. Its Solscan page is now your page as well hahah.
5. If you don’t want to parse and analyze on-chain data, use Solscan or another on-chain explorer. It’s the best tool for manual checks. Spend some time getting familiar with the UI. For example, if you see a wallet that makes swaps with several atomic transactions within one second, such as WSOL → TOKEN1 → TOKEN2 → WSOL, then it’s an arbitrage bot (notice that their enter and exit with the same token) and you should ignore it. If you see that a wallet makes hundreds of swaps of the same token within a minute, it’s part of a token creator scheme: check the bubble map to see the whole picture. And so on.
6. You found a profitable wallet, made your analysis, and everything looks great. Don’t forget to check if this wallet has already been copied extensively. Use google + twitter/reddit/etc search to check this address. Check followers amount in the GMGN UI. Does everything look good? All right, one last step: go to any DEX and check a couple of this wallet’s latest trade charts. You don’t want to see the price increase significantly when they buy and decrease significantly when they sell, and you know why it’s so.
7. Most copy trading bots have a Discord channel where users share their P&L images. Don’t share anything. I can find the wallet you’re copying in three minutes. You don’t want anyone to find the wallets you’re copying.
8. The most important thing, which is more useful that everything I described here: avoid scammers. They are everywhere: under this post, in Discord channels, in your Telegram messages, everywhere. Do your own research and check everything hundreds of times, think twice (hundred times) before any action.
9. And finally last thing, sounds funny but “The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding”.

No LLM was used for this post, except for DeepL Write to fix the grammar, since English is not my native language.