Follow Their Signals Exactly, or Apply Your Own SL/TP: Two Ways to Copy in Trade By Focus

Two telegram signal copy settings — and why the difference matters

Most signal copiers give you one mode: copy what the group sends, full stop. Trade By Focus gives you two, and choosing the wrong one for your situation is the kind of thing you won't notice until a signal fires with a 60-pip stop when you'd budgeted for 25.

Both modes live inside Signal Group Tasks — the part of Trade By Focus that connects to a Telegram signal group you're already a member of and turns its messages into real pending orders on your MT5 account. No bot to add, nothing for the group owner to touch. You configure it on your phone, and the hosted engine handles everything from there.

The two modes are called Follow their signals exactly and Use my preset. They sound simple. The detail is where it gets interesting.

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Follow their signals exactly

This mode takes the group's entry, stop-loss, and take-profits — and uses them. Your only input is lot size per pair.

So if a signal comes in reading Buy XAUUSD at 2,315, SL 2,298, TP1 2,330, TP2 2,355 — that's exactly what gets placed. You've set, say, 0.10 lots on gold, so a 0.10 lot buy limit goes to 2,315 with those precise levels attached.

What makes this mode more than a basic copier is what happens after the order is live. When the group sends a follow-up message — move stop to breakeven, adjust TP2, close half the position, shift SL to 2,322 — Trade By Focus reads that message and acts on your open trade in real time. You don't have to be watching. The hosted engine is running on Trade By Focus's servers whether your phone is in your pocket or out of signal entirely.

For groups that manage their trades actively and tend to post trailing instructions, partial closes, or amended TPs throughout the day, this mode earns its place. You're effectively shadowing the group's risk management, not just their entries.

The catch is obvious: you're trusting their stop placement. If the group consistently runs wide stops on GBPJPY because their lot sizing assumes smaller positions than yours, you might be taking on more risk per trade than you'd calculated. That's not a reason to avoid this mode — it's a reason to run Signal Lab first and check what the group's average stop size has actually been over the last 30 days before you go live.

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Use my preset

This mode ignores the group's SL and TP entirely. The signal supplies only the entry price. Everything else — stop-loss distance, take-profit ladder, breakeven trigger, trailing stop — comes from a preset you've built and saved.

A preset in Trade By Focus can carry a full five-level TP ladder (TP1 through TP5), an auto-breakeven that moves your stop to entry the moment TP1 is hit, and a trailing stop you can start at any stage of the ladder or once a set profit is banked. You build it once, save it, attach it to the group, and every signal that fires from that group gets wrapped in your rules automatically.

This suits traders who've already worked out their risk parameters and don't want a signal group overriding them. If you've decided every gold trade gets a 20-pip stop, TP1 at 15 pips with breakeven triggered there, and a trail from TP2 onwards — you don't want a group sending a 45-pip stop and your copier just shrugging and using it.

I learned this the slow way after following a group that posted excellent entries but had genuinely chaotic stop placement. Some signals had 15-pip stops, others had 80. My position sizing was all over the place by week three.

With preset mode, you take back control of the risk side without losing the signal's core value, which is the entry level itself.

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What preset mode does NOT change

This is the bit that trips people up, so it's worth being direct about it.

Preset mode changes the SL and TP. It does not change when or how the entry fires.

If the group sends a range signal — "Buy XAUUSD between 2,310 and 2,318" — that still becomes a Range Watch on Trade By Focus's live chart, regardless of which mode you're using. A zone call is a zone call. You get a draggable range zone on the chart, and the order fires when price enters that zone. Your preset then wraps it with your own stops and targets. But the entry mechanic — the Range Watch — is still there, exactly as it would be in Follow mode.

Same logic applies to single-price calls. They become pending orders either way. Preset mode only touches what happens to the trade after the entry is live.

This matters because some traders assume preset mode turns everything into a market order or changes the entry logic. It doesn't. The signal still controls the entry. You control the risk.

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Picking the right mode for a group

A quick way to think about it: does the group's risk management style match yours?

If the group runs disciplined, consistent stops and posts follow-up management instructions throughout the trade — move to BE, close partials, update TPs — Follow their signals exactly is probably the right call. You're getting the full picture of how they trade, not just the entry.

If the group posts solid entries but their stops are inconsistent, too wide for your account size, or they rarely send management updates after the initial signal — Use my preset gives you their entries with your own exit strategy around them.

You can also run Signal Lab before you commit to either mode. It tracks the group's last 30 days of calls against live prices and gives you a plain-English verdict on whether the signals are actually followable at realistic speeds. If the group regularly signals entries that move 40 pips before a retail trader could get filled, that shapes which mode makes sense — and whether you'd want to follow at all.

These telegram signal copy settings are per group, not global. So if you're connected to two groups simultaneously, one can be in Follow mode and the other in preset mode. The configuration stays separate.

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Trade By Focus is live at tradebyfocus.com with a 7-day free trial — full Pro access, Signal Group Tasks included, hosted MT5 so nothing has to stay running on your end. If you want to see how Signal Lab scores a group before you risk anything, there's more on that here.