Lead Trader Behavior Playbook

Published on 9 Aug 2023Updated on 24 Sept 20244 min read

Trader criteria

This article outlines the guidelines designed for lead traders on OKX. By adhering to these guidelines, lead traders can enjoy special benefits, such as increased exposure and traffic, a higher copy trader limit, and higher priority to take part in official promotional activities. Traders who don’t meet our standards may have their traffic limited or have their lead trader position revoked. As we develop our copy trading feature, we’ll continue to adjust and update these guidelines.

What qualities do we encourage in our lead traders?

  1. Experience: Lead traders who’ve led trades on OKX for a long time under different market conditions and brought profit to their copy traders.

  2. Authenticity: Lead traders who use large amounts of their actual funds in their lead trades and take on the same risk as the traders copying them.

  3. Stability: Lead traders who have a clear strategy for risk control and stopping losses. They take responsibility for users, have a low max drawdown, set a reasonable stop loss, and try to ensure a positive PnL for copy traders.

  4. Trustworthiness: Lead traders whose affiliate traders trust and are willing to copy them. They can bring new traders to OKX.

  5. Good communication skills: Lead traders who actively guide and educate copy traders, helping them make reasonable copy trades and balance returns and risks. As a result, copy traders are willing to copy them long-term.


What behavior do we discourage in our lead traders?

  1. Lead traders who fake their name, use an account verified for someone else, or buy another person’s account.

  2. Lead traders who falsify account data or create many different lead trade accounts.

  3. Lead traders who hedge transactions to influence data while making sure they don’t make a loss.

  4. Lead traders who hold onto unprofitable trades and don’t set stop losses, resulting in copy traders making losses and having their positions liquidated.

  5. Lead traders who open trades with low funds, make random or extreme trades, don’t take responsibility for their copy traders, and change accounts if their account data becomes poor.

  6. Lead traders who imitate the trades and strategies of other lead traders, or imitate their nickname or profile picture.

  7. Lead traders who direct traffic to external platforms or promote their social media accounts.

Optimization of Market board ranking 

Based on the criteria above, we’ve adjusted the placement of traders within the Market board. Our ranking is also based on the following 2 standards.

  • Encourage authentic trades: Lead traders who invest more funds into their lead trades will place higher in the rankings

  • Encourage long-term, stable trades: Lead traders who have led trades for more time will place higher in the rankings.


We’ve also adjusted our ranking logic for traders on the Leaderboard, bringing in the following 2 standards.

  • Encourage authentic trades: We’ve increased the threshold for getting listed on the Leaderboard, requiring a higher minimum principal and PnL.

  • Encourage the listing of lead traders: In the future, non-lead traders will have their ranking decreased, so traffic can be directed toward lead traders instead.


We reserve the right to add or modify these standards without prior notice. 

Trader real-name verification (Coming soon)

In line with our responsibility for our copy traders, we need to more clearly understand the real individual traders behind each lead trading account. In the future, we’ll be launching a real-name verification process for our lead traders. We’ll verify traders through methods including video authentication and offline meetings. After verification, lead traders will get more exposure on OKX. What’s more, lead traders will only be able to increase their copy trader limit after they complete verification. Once the new process has been launched, we’ll contact high-performing traders who meet our requirements to carry out the verification process.