Holding time: why a two-week trade is a different product

A trader who closes positions within an hour and a trader who holds for two weeks can show identical ROI. For a follower they are different products entirely, and this is the component most leaderboards ignore.

Why holding time matters so much

Copy trading replicates trades, not positions. The time you need is the time the trader needs to be in the market. If the trader holds for two weeks, you are sitting outside the market for two weeks of every cycle with whatever margin you assigned. During that time:

• you earn nothing and pay no risk either - the capital is idle;
• you cannot react to the drawdown, because there is no position;
• the sequence of trades you do copy may not produce the same result as the trader's own exits, because you entered late relative to their average.

Long holds are not a feature of a strategy. They are a liquidity constraint on the follower.

The thresholds we use

90-day average holding time	Penalty	What it usually is
≤ 12 h	0	Intraday or short swing.
24 h	−1	Normal swing trading.
48 h	−2	Multi-day positions.
120 h	−5	A swing trader, or a grid with long legs.
480 h (20 days)	−20 (cap)	Effectively an investment position that trades intraday.

The cap matters: at a week per position, no amount of quality compensates for the fact that a follower is not present for most of the cycle.

What "holding time" means in the data

We use the exchange's average position time over 90 days (AvePositionTime), converted to hours. It is an average, not a median, so one long position can move it noticeably - treat a sudden jump as "check the recent trades", not as a change in strategy.

There is a technical caveat worth knowing: the all-time field for this metric is an exact copy of the 90-day figure, so we always use the 90-day window. It is reported on the trader page with a note.

How to combine it with the rest

Holding time is only interpretable next to the trade count:

• Many trades, short holds: intraday or grid. Check volatility and the liquidation column before anything else.
• Few trades, long holds: the ROI number is dominated by a handful of positions. This is where ROI as a ranking key is most misleading, and why the risk-adjusted pages exist.
• Long holds with high Sharpe: the account is probably genuinely good - it is just not the kind of thing you can copy and hold at a size.

Practical advice for a follower

1. Your capital has an opportunity cost. A trader averaging five days per position uses your deposit for five days per cycle.
2. Your entry is worse than theirs. You join when they join, but you cannot join at their scale if your deposit is smaller, and your per-symbol caps may cut the position.
3. Set copy parameters accordingly. Small deposits copying long-hold traders should expect a lot of inactivity; that is normal, not a broken subscription.
4. Look at the monthly returns strip. It shows how much of the year the account was actually in the market - if most months are flat, the ROI came from a few windows.

Holding time is not quality. It is a product characteristic, and you should buy it deliberately rather than by accident.