If you can copy trade them and make money, that means they could make money trading the money as well. The only thing copy trading does in 90% of cases if not more is complicate things and make it more difficult for both the people with the edge and the person following the edge. It adds another layer of complexity and depending on the strategy it can make it exponentially more difficult particularly if it's shorter time frame trades. I am actually running into this now. Not a huge fan of the copy trading, but person I am working with, refuses to do anything else until they make "x" doing that first. Now I had to slightly adjust my strategy to make it more suitable for someone to follow and have to deal with the fills they get, scaling out too slow, errors on their end and etc. It's not like it's unworkable, but it definitely can be a little frustrating some days. PS: If you're talking about a program physically and automatically copying their trades I don't have much experience with that, but if there strategy can't or doesn't use limit orders, fills can still be an a potential issue. Also, if you're talking about a "signal service". I don't have much experience with that either. I am purely speaking on someone literally trading with you real time via screen share and voice.
What is this signal service garbage people mention like it's industry standard. I get that it's popular, but it's totally bs. Trying to take trades off of an alert system like email, text or being posted in a text room. No one that is seriously trying to money should be doing and anyone that is seriously interested or needing / wanting people to copy them would be doing that garbage either. Both parties would be in direct contact and able to communicate an a efficient manner, because if both parties were serious that means both their paychecks are on the line.
IMO, copy trading can be a good option for individuals who are not able to create their own successful trading strategies. By copying the trades of someone who has been in industry for a long time, you could try making a potentially earn from them, but of course, you will need to do a proper research on which trader to pick from. And talking about the copy trading platform, I would recommend trying a demo with zulutrade or naga. Both are great platforms.
The whole basis for using a signal copy service is faulty. It relies on two initial presumptions which are both flawed and this allows a spurious market to spring up in signals. The false starting points are - 1. as a new trader I must invent my own strategy in order to be profitable 2. strategies that generate trade signals are too complex to replicate so I must just passively accept the signals it produces The signals may work. But very probably they are either - generated by a simple, conventional, well-known strategy with a minor TA feature added cosmetically, or generated by a highly complex series of meaningless TA criteria which collectively have no proven - in fact no provable - reliability Its possible signal copying can teach something about stop-loss and take-profit identification but the cost and risk in achieving this is unjustified.
All the signal providers trade with Price Action, mostly SMC or ICT approach, so highly discretionary. If someone trades this style or wants to learn this, then signal trading is the best way to learn, because there are skilled people already who are doing the work for you. You can learn from them. For all other trading styles this is not suitable, then they may be a diversification to your other trading strategies. Do not think you need to do all from sratch yourself, you can look at good signal providers and learn from them. But only in case you want to trade discretionary on Price Action. Then this is the right place for you.