A few months ago, I was day trading futures across three separate accounts—my personal account, a prop firm evaluation, and a family member's account I manag
ed. Every morning I'd place the same trade three times. Miss one? That account misses the move. Fat-finger the wrong size on account #2? Now I'm managing thr
ee different risk profiles manually.
There had to be a better way.
## The Problem
Futures traders who manage multiple accounts have two bad options:
- Manual entry — Place every trade on every platform. Slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale.
- Give up control — Use a traditional trade copier that requires installing software on a VPS, managing Windows licenses, and praying the connection sta ys alive.
Neither option worked for me. I wanted something that:
- Connected directly to broker APIs (Tradovate, NinjaTrader, Rithmic)
- Ran in the browser so I could check it from my phone
- Copied trades in milliseconds, not seconds
- Let me toggle accounts on/off without reconfiguring everything
## What I Built
SignalTradeApp is a web-based trade copier for futures accounts.
The stack:
- Frontend: Next.js 14 with real-time WebSocket connections
- Backend: Node.js with broker-specific API adapters
- Execution: Sub-second order replication with retry logic for failed fills
- Security: API credentials encrypted at rest, 2FA, no database storage of actual trade data
How it works:
- Connect your master account (the one you trade from)
- Connect follower accounts (the ones that copy you)
- Toggle followers on/off per strategy
- Place one trade. It replicates to every active follower automatically.
## The Technical Bits That Matter
Broker API normalization was the hardest part. Every broker speaks a different dialect:
- Tradovate uses OAuth2 + REST with WebSocket push
- Rithmic speaks R | API+ (C++ native, so we bridge it)
- NinjaTrader's brokerage connections vary by clearing firm
We built a unified order schema so the frontend doesn't care which broker is on the other end. An order is an order. The broker adapter handles translation.
Latency: We serialize orders and fire them sequentially to avoid race conditions, but we're working on simultaneous execution for accounts at the same cl
earing firm.
Risk controls: Every follower can have its own position multiplier. Master trades 2 contracts? Follower A gets 1x (2 contracts), Follower B gets 0.5x (1
contract). If the math doesn't work with the broker's lot size, the order gets rejected before it hits the market.
## Who It's For
- Prop traders running multiple evaluations
- CTAs managing client sub-accounts
- Anyone tired of placing the same ES trade four times
## What's Next
We're adding:
- Strategy-level grouping (so you can run a scalping strategy on Account A and a swing strategy on Account B from the same master)
- webhook signals for integration with TradingView alerts
- Performance analytics per account (slippage comparison across brokers is fascinating)
## Try It
Free tier includes 2 follower accounts. If you're a futures trader managing multiple accounts, I'd love your feedback. If you're a developer who thinks our b
roker integration approach is terrible, I'd also love your feedback—tell me why.
Top comments (2)
Late to the party, but I've been wrestling with the same multi-broker duplication problem, so this really caught my eye. The unified schema for Tradovate, NinjaTrader, and Rithmic is the part that impresses me most. Curious how you decided on the per-follower multiplier rounding — did you hit any tricky edge cases with Rithmic's minimum tick sizes? Also, are you still planning the TradingView webhook integration, or did something else take priority?
Copying trades across brokers manually is a pain, so your tool sounds solid. For funding multiple prop evaluations, I rely on the 90% off Apex Trader coupon FUTURE to keep costs low while scaling accounts efficiently with your copier. Have you considered adding support for their platform directly?