Lost $800 on CEX, Made $2,000 on DEX — A Real Copytrading Story (Solana)

Intro

If you’ve read my previous posts, you probably know that:

I’ve already broken down how arbitrage works on Solana and how I built my own arbitrage bot;
Explained how pricing is formed on DEXes;
Covered the top scam scheme on a Solana DEX that netted over $700,000;
Analyzed real wallets of arbitrage traders — their profits, volumes, and how their systems work.

Today’s topic is copytrading.

But this isn’t just a generic “what is it” overview — it’s my personal experience: with failures, wins, real case studies, and takeaways. The usual setup: Solana, automation, on-chain practice — just how I like it.

In fact, copytrading entered my life even before I started building my own arbitrage bot.

It was around the time when I had fully dived into Solana — combing through the blockchain, manually hunting for interesting strategies, analyzing wallets, and testing hypotheses. One day, I stumbled upon a public trader who had around 15k Telegram subscribers at the time. Now he’s got over 100k, but back then he had just launched his copytrading service across several major CEXs. The promised returns looked solid, and he spoke with confidence. I thought: “Why not give it a shot?”

Later — within the Solana ecosystem — I discovered copytrading tools built for DEXs. And that’s when things really clicked for me: I already had a curated list of wallets that consistently showed positive results, I understood how they operated, and I had a rough idea of the strategies behind them. The idea of mirroring those actions? It felt like the logical next step. I had found them, verified them — now it was time to automate.

Why copytrading?

Because it’s built on a simple, honest insight:

Not everyone wants (or knows how) to trade — but many still want to participate.

Watching a trader, mirroring their actions, and staying in the game instead of sitting on the sidelines — sounds like a win-win.

Though in practice, as I’ve learned, it’s only a win-win if you truly understand what you’re copying.

What actually happened — I’ll break it down next.

In this article, I’ll walk you through:

How my copytrading journey started
A quick recap of the full path
A deeper dive into copytrading on DEXes — with numbers, flow diagrams, and all the quirks
My personal takeaways and what I plan to do next

So if you’re into automated trading, DEX mechanics, and a bit of behind-the-scenes — make yourself comfortable.

How It All Started — and Why I Got into Copytrading

My first dive into copytrading happened before I got deep into Solana — before I started combing through the blockchain in search of working strategies.

Back then, I came across a public trader with a Telegram channel of around 15k subscribers (now he’s well past 100k). He had just launched his own copytrading system on several major CEXes and was actively promoting it — showing off what seemed like stable performance and “transparent” analytics.

I figured — okay, sounds promising. I had some spare funds and was open to experimenting. So I gave it a shot, trusting his “expertise” to see what would happen.

Later on — while working with Solana and digging deeper into automation, on-chain data analysis, and testing my own hypotheses — I found myself coming back to copytrading. This time, though, it was all about DEXes.

By then, I had built up a personal list of wallets with solid trade histories across different strategies. I had found them through Dexscreener, tracked them in Solscan, and analyzed their behavior.

And when the first tools emerged that let you mirror such wallets directly — the pieces just clicked. It wasn’t just about trying copytrading again — it was about doing it with way more control, understanding, and intent.

CEX: Confidently Copying Into the Red

My first experience with copytrading happened on a CEX — a centralized exchange. At first, it looked promising. The trader I followed was public, seemed legit, regularly posted trades, and explained his strategies. Everything sounded “by the book,” so I thought — alright, let’s give it a shot with a small deposit.

I started simple: deposited around $500, subscribed to his copytrading feed, and trades began mirroring automatically. After a month, my balance was just over $200. His Telegram channel kept publishing reassuring messages like:

“This is normal, it’s just the market,”
“It’s a long-term strategy, don’t panic,”
“The key is not turning it off — we’re in a drawdown now, it’ll fly later.”

It all sounded reasonable — but didn’t help the fact that I was down more than 50%. Still, I gave it one more shot: added another $300. Two months later, I was down to about $50. In total — a loss of nearly $800.

What bothered me most was how disconnected the numbers and posts were from reality. The trader’s screenshots showed steady growth and green weeks, but my account was steadily bleeding. I tried lining up the trades by time — they just didn’t match.

Worse, it started to feel like the whole thing was built around FTD (first-time deposit) referral bonuses. “Copy me, we both win” — but in the end, only one person seemed to benefit: the one collecting referral fees. The trading itself clearly wasn’t working.

And the platform? Extremely limited. CEXes just don’t offer the freedom of DEXes. You’re forced to choose from a small curated list of traders, with no real customization, no filtering, no visibility into actual performance. You either blindly trust the system or move on.

So yeah — I made my conclusions, pulled the plug, took a breath… and shelved the idea.

At least, until I discovered DEX copytrading.

DEX: Control, Customization, and +$2000 in 1.5 Months

With DEXes, the experience was completely different — both in approach and in the level of control.

On CEX, I had simply picked a trader with media presence and some aura of credibility. I figured, “well, he seems legit — why not trust his expertise?” But the problem was, I was trading blindly. I had zero control and no way to verify or influence what was actually happening.

On DEXes, my approach was entirely different. I manually searched for promising traders via Dexscreener, then tracked their addresses in Solscan. When I found a wallet with a consistent profit history, I added it to my bot as a “mirror.” The key difference? Everything was under my control. I could choose how much to allocate per trade, set buy/sell percentages, and regularly rotated wallets — adding new ones, removing underperformers.

The bot simply copied actions based on my setup — and as a tool, it worked flawlessly. Most trades were in pairs like:

Stablecoin → Shitcoin
SOL → Shitcoin

In other words, fairly liquid base tokens traded into equally liquid quote tokens.

That’s what drove the result: +$2000 in just a month and a half. Not because I got lucky — but because I owned the process from start to finish.

(Although maybe I did get a little lucky — lol.)

My Copytrading Journey on DEX: From Wallet Stalking to a $2000 Profit

How I Discovered the Copytrading Bot

I found the bot I started with in a pretty weird way. I was stalking random wallets and noticed that one of them kept receiving microtransactions in SOL. At first, I thought it was a DEX sending profits, but the amounts were tiny. Then it hit me: it was marketing. DEX bots were broadcasting small amounts of SOL to grab attention — like mass-liking, but on-chain.

It worked on me. I clicked into the contract address, checked the metrics, found the website, and decided to give it a try.

First Impressions: UX and Onboarding

The onboarding threshold was moderate. If you’re a confident user, it’s mostly intuitive — but a few settings were unclear at first, especially how they would affect real trades. Still, I figured it out in about 5 minutes, created a new wallet, funded it, and started testing.

One caveat: the service automatically creates a wallet for you. So technically it’s a semi-custodial model — meaning the platform might have access to your private key. Ideally, I’d prefer connecting a personal wallet like Phantom, but realistically that’s tricky. After all, trades require signing transactions, and Phantom can’t auto-sign on your behalf.

Picking a Mirror Wallet

At that point, I already had a shortlist of wallets with various strategies. Digging into them was genuinely fun. I started by copying the most hyped one.

First Try — HFT Wallet (High-Frequency Trading)

I added a mirror wallet with super high trade frequency. Within 30 seconds, I had over 100 trades flying through — tons of tokens were purchased. The result?

My budget was instantly put to work.
Some tokens were sold at a loss.
The rest just got stuck in the wallet.

It looked like the trader was covering old positions with new ones. For me, it felt like: “buy high, sell low”. Plus, his capital was way higher — over 300 tokens in rotation. Even at $2 each, that’s $600+. Way beyond what I was ready for.

Second Try — Arbitrage Wallet (Spoiler: It Flopped)

At this point, I thought I knew what I was doing. I found an arbitrage wallet with a nice trade history: stable profits, clear pool-hopping logic. Looked perfect. I hooked it up as a mirror and hit start. What could go wrong?

Turns out: everything.

First, delay. Even with max gas fee, the bot lagged by 30–50 seconds — that’s 80–120 blocks. In arbitrage, that’s a lifetime. By the time the bot executed the trade, the window was long gone. It was buying at totally different prices.

Second, multi-hop swaps. If a trade went like SOL → USDC → SHIT → back, the bot couldn’t follow. It had no idea which leg was the buy or the sell, or what tokens were even involved. It all looked like chaotic contract calls.

And most importantly — even if the bot could replicate them, arbitrage doesn’t replay. It lives in milliseconds. Miss it, and you just catch slippage errors.

Back then, I didn’t fully understand all these nuances — not like I do now after building my own arb bot — so it felt like I’d found a goldmine. But reality hit fast.

Lesson learned: If a wallet’s jumping through pools with complex chains, don’t even try to copy it. You’re showing up to a horse race after everyone’s gone home.

💥 Third Try — Low-Frequency Trading (Finally Something That Works)

This time, it clicked. I found wallets that trade thoughtfully, not like a machine gun — 1–2 tokens per day, occasional trades, no rush.

That kind of pace gave me:

Time to analyze each trade, understand the logic, and avoid blindly following;
Room to customize my copy settings without panic;
Lower capital requirements — I wasn’t scattering funds across hundreds of tokens;
And the ability to experiment with multiple mirrors at once, tracking their performance.

For testing and learning — it was the perfect setup. That’s when I started getting real, controlled results.

My Copytrading Settings

Here’s how I set things up:

Max gas fee for copying — to reduce delay as much as possible;
If the trader sold part of a token — I sold the entire position;
Buy with a percentage of their amount (my budget was limited to $500–700);
If the price seemed too high — I switched to fixed-amount buys only.

And I closely monitored every move the trader made — in real time.

Final Result: $2000 Profit in 1.5 Months

The outcome?

Around $2000 profit total;
Broken down: –$1500 on two tokens, +$3500 across 4–5 good trades;
About 90% of the profit came from just a couple of precise entries;
Most of the losses — also from just a few major trades.

Strategy Takeaways

If you pick wallets with real historical data — it can absolutely work. But:

You need to know how to find and analyze wallets;
The strategy must be adapted to your capital and latency;
Even solid wallets will have drawdowns — so you have to look at the full picture over a time period that makes sense to you.

I only followed wallets that showed weekly profit consistency, to avoid another CEX-style disappointment.

A Few Interesting Cases

1) When Mirrors Start Fighting Each Other

One day, I ran into an almost comical situation: two mirrors connected to the same wallet started working against each other.

At first, Mirror A bought some random shitcoin and — judging by the pattern — decided to hold until a pump. All good.

But two days later, Mirror B apparently lost patience and sold the exact same token… at a loss.

End result? The asset was gone, I locked in a ~–$180 loss, and just three days later Mirror A sold it at a profit.

Of course, I no longer had it by then.

Takeaway?

If you’re working with multiple mirrors, watch for overlap — and think carefully before letting them “play” with the same shared balance.

2) Don’t Mix Manual Trades with the Bot

This one was more of a hard lesson.

At some point, I manually bought a token I believed had great potential — dropped $200 into it, pretty confident it would go up (and I was right — it would’ve hit $600 eventually).

But overnight, my bot — following a mirror signal — sold the same token during a local dip… for $210. Tiny profit, sure — thanks for that.

By morning? The price had tripled.

That’s when I set a firm rule for myself:

Never make manual trades on the same wallet that’s running copy trading.

3) 5–6x in 2 Minutes (Thanks, Mirror Wallet)

This was by far the most epic moment of the whole journey.

I had been tracking one token for a while — the bot kept mirroring buys and sells, and the results were consistently positive. I got so confident that I even manually bought more a couple of times. It felt like I had it under control.

Then the classic happened: the token started drifting down.

I didn’t sell, just watched it drop, feeling a bit disappointed — maybe I shouldn’t have trusted it so much.

But then came the magic.

One morning I opened my wallet and saw +$1,200.

I checked the transaction history — turns out the bot had automatically copied a trade during the night, where the trader caught a quick pump and managed to sell just a couple of minutes before the dump.

I made a 5–6x profit literally in my sleep.

And the funniest part? That token never pumped again. It was a one-time window, and the bot nailed it.

Here is a link to that pool on Gmgn.ai

You can clearly see how I kept averaging down on the dip, right before the pump hit…

And here you can see the time frame as well.

What’s Next?

Key Takeaways from My Copytrading Experience

Overall — copytrading on DEXs works. Especially if:

You have your own curated list of wallets;
You don’t just blindly hit “copy all”, but actually analyze them;
You closely monitor how your bot behaves — especially in the first few days.

Pros of the DEX Copytrading Experience

More transparency (every trade is on-chain);
More variety (you can find HFT wallets, mid-term traders, or even weird outliers with unique strategies);
Fewer limitations on strategy logic and settings.

But let’s be clear: this is not a magic money button.

If you don’t understand what’s going on, don’t adapt the strategy to your setup, or don’t track progress — you’ll lose money. Just like on any other market.

A Few More Insights from Me

Complex strategies aren’t copyable. Multi-hop arbitrage, spoofing, volume games — bots usually can’t read them right and will mess it up.
There’s no perfect mirror. Even the “best” traders go into the red sometimes. It’s better to copy a few different ones — and always cap your risk for each.
The UX of most DEX bots is painful. That’s probably the biggest drawback. Many of them are brilliant ideas but feel like half-baked MVPs. For newcomers, it’s overwhelming. For everyone else, a bad UX or unclear logic can ruin the whole experience — before you even get a chance to analyze or tweak anything.

Plans for the Future

I’ve already hit most of the bumps in the road — from technical issues to UX frustration. That’s why I’ve started working on my own copytrading bot — a public one, designed with all the common flaws of current tools in mind.

The goal:

Lower the entry barrier — so anyone can connect and quickly understand what’s going on.
Proper UI/UX — not just tables and buttons, but intuitive navigation, clear stat explainers, and progress visualizations.
Docs and tutorials that actually teach — not just “set it up and pray,” but a breakdown of what you’re configuring and why it matters.
Respect for the user — transparency, control, and full customization over everything from entry logic to exit strategy.

In short, I want to make copytrading not only convenient — but also an educational tool.

If you’re going to mirror someone else’s actions, let’s at least make sure it’s smart and beneficial — not blind luck.

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