Ouf of sync between leader and followers

Initial Steps

The out of sync between the leader and the followers can happen at two moments, when entering and leaving a trade:

After being copied to follower accounts, an entry or exit limit order might not be filled due to the market price not reaching the specified limit, insufficient liquidity, or the order's position in the queue, or partial fills when not enough contracts are available at the limit price. The responsibility for an unfilled order doesn't lie with the trader, the copier or the broker; it's a result of market conditions and the dynamics of supply and demand. Brokers execute orders based on set conditions but don't control market prices or liquidity. Understanding market conditions and the nature of traded futures is essential for managing expectations around limit orders.

There are several reasons why a limit order might not be filled:

1. Market Price Hasn't Reached the Limit Price: The most common reason is that the market price has not reached the specified limit price. If the market does not move to or beyond your limit price, the order will not execute.
2. Lack of Liquidity: Even if the market price reaches your limit price, if there isn't enough liquidity your order may not be filled.
3. Order Priority: The market operates on a first-come, first-served (FIFO) basis. If there are orders placed before yours at the same limit price, those orders may be filled first, especially in a fast-moving market where the price hovers around the limit price briefly. This can lead to the leader's order being filled and the followers' not.
4. Partial Fills: In some cases, your order might be partially filled if there are not enough contracts available at your limit price to complete your order in full. The unfilled portion of the order remains active until the market can fulfill it or until you cancel the order.

It's worth mentioning that market dynamics sometimes prevent all orders at a specific price from being executed due to insufficient demand. Normally, the market fills some orders while others remain open.

To prevent this type of situation we have two features in Replikanto that you can use, one of them is ATM Copy, which uses Ninjatrader's ATM strategy to manage the follower's exit orders instead of copying them from the leader account. This is useful if you're using a NinjaTrader ATM strategy in the leader account's trades, and you are submitting trades inside the NinjaTrader. The other alternative is to use the Follower Guard feature, which was created to protect follower accounts and has an action that, when enabled, will cancel the entry and exit orders if the entry order is not filled by the market after a few seconds of filling the leading order, and will flatten the follower if the exit order has not been filled by the market on the follower but has been filled on the leader's side.

Extra Steps

You can also use the feature to copy only the executions to the followers, so that the follower will always send orders to the market, thus ensuring that the entry and exit orders are filled, mitigating or even eliminating the problem of accounts becoming out of sync. To find out more about the Market Only feature, click on this link.

It is also worth remembering that using the Replikanto's Cross Order feature where the order is copied to the followers on a different instrument can increase the chances of the order not being filled on one side, because the two instruments, although they always move together, there are times when the price of one can vary a few ticks compared to the price of the other, most commonly in times of high volatility, causing orders to be filled on one side and not the other. For example, when using the NQ instrument for the leader and the MNQ for the followers, a stop order placed at the price of 15000 might be filled on the followers where the MNQ price has reached 15000 and not on the leader where the price has only reached 14999.75.