Copy actually open (old) trades in the master MT4 account

Local Trade Copier can also copy old trades (actually open positions) from the master account. This means it is possible to copy those trades that are currently open on the master account.

By default LTC will copy only new trades. This means that once you start the LTC it will not copy any of the trades that are already running on the master account.

In the picture below there are settings that allows to copy open trades from the master account. You can even control how old those trades can be.

MT4 copier set to copy all open positions from the master

The CopyOpenPositions tells the Client EA to copy all currently open positions on the master account. This is specifically for copying currently active market orders. Note that this does not affect pending orders, because there is another options for this called OpenNonTriggeredPendingOrders which is enabled by default. It means on start-up Client EA will copy any pending orders from the master account which are not triggered yet.

If CopyOpenPositions is set to true, the Client EA will set IgnoreTradesBeforeTimeStamp=”1971.01.01 00:00″. This tells the Client EA to ignore any trades from the master account that were opened before year 1971, which simply means it will ignore nothing and copy any trades it find on the master account.

Obviously you can set IgnoreTradesBeforeTimeStamp to any custom value you need, but if you just need to copy all currently running trades simply set the CopyOpenPositions=true.

Note that MaxPriceDeviation and any trade filters will be applied, so you might not get all the trades copied. You might need to set IgnorePriceDeviation=true and disable trade filters to copy all positions.

The IgnoreTradesWhenTooFar tells the Client EA whether it should ignore the trade if delay it, in case current market price is already too far from the entry price (MaxPriceDeviationPips).

Example copying old trades

So lets say you have 3 trades running on the master account.

1st trade is from April 25th, 2014 and the other two trades are even older, from February. So you want to copy the trade from April 25th and ignore the other two. By default the Client EA would ignore all of them, but if you set the

IgnoreTradesBeforeTimeStamp=2014.04.25 00:00

you will basically tell the Client EA to ignore all the trades that were opened before this date. This means we get the trade from April 25th and those two from February will be ignored.

Now of course it will likely be that these old trades are far from the current market price and this means you will need to set the

IgnorePriceDeviation=true

This will tell the Client EA to not worry about how far the trade open price is from the current market price.

I hope that helps, and please share this information with someone who needs it.

You may also want to check the The Definitive Guide to Forex Trade Copying to learn more about how to use the Local Trade Copier and copy trades between multiple MetaTrader 4 accounts.