Risk controls

Copy trading spends your money without asking you each time. That is the point of it, and it is also the risk, so this page sets out every control that stands between a creator you follow and your wallet.

What you control

Everything under Trade settings applies to your whole account, not to one creator. Pausing is the only per-creator control.

Setting	Default	What it does
Sizing	Fixed amount	Fixed amount, percent of balance, or match trader. See How it executes.
Per trade	$10	The dollar amount each copied buy spends, between $1 and $25,000.
Balance per trade	5%	Used by the percent-of-balance mode, between 0.1% and 100%.
Maximum per trade	No max	The ceiling when you match the creator’s size. Required in that mode.
Minimum leader trade	$0	Ignore trades below this dollar size. Filters out a creator’s small experiments. Buys only.
Slippage mode	Auto	Automatic bands, or your own number per side, up to 25%.
Max per token	The platform’s own	The most you will hold in a single token.
Max total exposure	The platform’s own	The most you will hold across all copied tokens.
Max open positions	The platform’s own	How many copied tokens you can hold at once, between 1 and 100.
Take Profit / Stop Loss defaults	Off	Levels applied to new positions automatically.
Priority	Auto	Off, Auto, Fast or Turbo. Higher tiers bid more to land in a contested block.
Mirror sells	On	Whether a creator’s sells close your position too. Turn it off and you exit on your own terms.
Pause copying	Off	Stops all mirroring. Watching continues.

You can follow up to 10 creators at once.

The settings dialog also shows an Engine limits panel, which is read-only. Each limit there is badged as either yours or the platform’s, so you can always see which one is actually binding.

Exposure caps are tighten-only. Verus applies its own ceilings as well, and the one that binds is whichever is lower. You can always make yourself more conservative than the platform; you can never make yourself less. The Engine limits panel shows the live values and badges each one as yours or the platform’s, which is the authoritative view.

Two limits are easy to confuse because both are dollar figures. $25,000 is the most a single trade may be sized at. $50,000 is the most you may hold in one token across many trades. They are different questions and they bind at different moments.

Take-profit and stop-loss

You can attach standing exit rules to any copied position, from the TP/SL button on its row. They run on the Verus servers, not in your browser, so they keep working when your tab is closed and your laptop is shut.

Up to 6 rules per position, in any mix of take-profits and stop-losses.
A level is set as a percentage gain or loss from your average entry. It is resolved into a fixed price the moment you press Set, and later buys into the same position do not move it.
Each rule sells a share of the position: 25%, 50% or all. That is how you ladder out, selling a quarter at one level and the rest at another.
A live rule reads back in plain words, for example Active: sells all when the price is above $0.0042, so you can check it says what you meant.
A rule fires on the first crossing of its level. If the price gaps past several of your rules at once, all of them fire.
A firing is an ordinary sell. It pays the same fee, and it can be retried the same way if it fails to land.
You can set default take-profit and stop-loss percentages in Trade settings so new positions get them automatically.

A stop-loss is not a guarantee of a price. It fires on a mark derived from the pool your token would actually be sold into. A pool with almost nothing in it yields no usable mark at all, in which case the rule cannot fire, and a violent move can take the price past your level before the sale lands. Treat a stop as an instruction to try, not as a floor.

What Verus enforces regardless of your settings

Limit	Why it exists
$25,000 per-trade settings ceiling	The per-trade amount, and the maximum you set when matching a creator, cannot be set above $25,000. Note that percent-of-balance sizing is not bounded by this figure: with no maximum set, one buy in that mode is bounded only by your wallet balance and the caps below.
$50,000 per token	The platform’s own exposure ceiling on a single token.
$250,000 in total	The platform’s own ceiling across all your copied positions.
200 open positions	The platform’s own ceiling on how many copied tokens you can hold at once.
Hourly spend ceiling per wallet	Bounds the time dimension. A creator on a spree, or a fault on our side, cannot drain a wallet through an unbounded number of individually reasonable trades in one hour.
Platform-wide hourly ceiling	A ceiling across every user at once, set above the largest legitimate burst. If it trips, something is wrong, and new buys stop for the rest of the hour.
15-second freshness budget	A buy more than 15 seconds behind the trade it copies is refused.
Token safety checks	See below.

Token safety checks

On Solana, a token’s own rules live on chain, in the token’s mint account. Whoever created the token chose those rules, and some of them let the creator act against holders after the sale. Before buying, Verus reads that account and refuses tokens carrying the mechanics used to trap buyers:

A freeze authority. Someone can freeze your account and stop you selling. This is the classic honeypot: the buy works, the sell never does.
A token that cannot be transferred at all. Same outcome, and it needs no authority to be exercised.
A permanent delegate. Someone can move or burn your tokens out of your wallet without your signature. Seizure, at the issuer’s discretion, whenever they like.
A transfer hook. Custom code runs on every transfer and can refuse it.
A transfer fee above a threshold. The token taxes every transfer, so it costs you on the way in and again on the way out. The threshold is 5%.

The check is one read of the token’s mint account, and it happens before the buy is sized. If it cannot be completed, the buy is refused rather than guessed at: an unreadable token is treated as an unsafe one.

One hazard is flagged but not blocked: an active mint authority. That means the creator can still mint more supply and dilute holders. It is not refused today, because it needs a market to act through and is not the direct seizure the rules above describe, but it is a real risk and it is common in new tokens.

These checks catch a category of mechanical trap. They do not make a token safe. A token with a perfectly clean configuration can still be worth nothing tomorrow, and nothing here is a judgment about a token’s value.

None of these gates apply to selling. An exit is never blocked, because being unable to get out is worse than anything the gate was protecting against. Withdrawing and redeeming rent are exempt from the spend ceilings entirely, and a sell charges only its platform fee against them rather than the value of what you are selling. Hitting a cap must never mean being unable to reach your own money.

Why a trade did not copy

Every decision not to trade is recorded with a reason and shown in your activity feed. The reasons fall into four groups, and the group is what tells you whether anything is owed from you. These are the reasons you are most likely to see; the app carries a plain sentence for every one, including any not listed here.

Group	Meaning
Your settings	Verus did exactly what you asked. Nothing to do.
Needs you	Something in your setup is blocking trades. You can fix it.
We refused	Verus declined on your behalf. Not your fault, nothing to fix.
We could not act	Something on our side did not work. Nothing you did caused it.

Everything in the first three groups, and most of the fourth, is a skip: nothing was attempted and no money moved. The three exceptions are marked below.

Your settings

Shown as	What happened
Copying paused	You paused copying.
Trader paused	You had this creator paused.
Below your minimum	The trade was smaller than your Minimum leader trade setting.
Mirror sells off	You turned off mirroring sells, so their sell was not copied.
Moved to cash	The creator bought a stablecoin. That is a move to cash, not a position.
Mirror size too small	Your size worked out below the minimum worth trading. Raise it.
Share too small	Your share of a sell was too small to be worth executing.
Nothing to sell	You held none of this token from copying, so there was nothing to sell.
Held from another trader	You hold this token from copying a different creator, so this one’s sell had none of your tokens to sell.
Token cap reached	The buy would have pushed one token past your exposure limit.
Total cap reached	The buy would have pushed your total exposure past its limit.
Position limit reached	You already hold the maximum number of copied tokens.
Inside cooldown	This creator traded again inside the cooldown window.

The three cap rows are your own limits doing what you set them to do, which is why they sit here rather than under something needing your attention.

Needs you

Shown as	What happened
No copy wallet	You had no copy wallet yet when this trade fired.
No trade size set	No per-trade amount configured, so nothing could be sized.
Sizing incomplete	Matching the creator’s size needs a maximum per trade. Set one.
Not enough SOL	Your copy wallet could not cover the trade plus its costs.
Not enough SOL for fees	You held the token but not the SOL to pay for selling it.

We refused

Shown as	What happened
Transfers can be blocked	The token can freeze or block transfers.
Unsafe mint authority	The token’s mint still carries an authority that can act against holders.
Transfer fee too high	The token taxes every transfer too heavily.
Custom transfer hook	The token runs custom code on transfer.
Mint unverified	The safety check could not complete, so the buy was refused.
Token blocked	The token is on the blocklist.
Blocked by policy	The transaction was refused by the signing policy gate.
Slippage limit hit	The price moved past your tolerance before the trade landed, so the chain rejected it. Reached the chain: the network fee was spent, and nothing was bought or sold.

We could not act

Shown as	What happened
Seen too late to copy	More than 15 seconds had passed by the time we could act. Entering that late means paying for a move the creator already caused.
Too busy to place	Too many copies were being placed at once, so this buy was dropped rather than sent late. Sells are never dropped this way.
Leader size unpriced	The creator’s trade size could not be priced, so yours could not be sized from it.
SOL price unavailable	The SOL price feed was unavailable, so the size could not be computed.
Transaction too large	The trade needed more accounts than one Solana transaction can carry.
No route to trade	No venue would trade the token at that moment. Never sent, no fee spent.
Routing unavailable	The routing service did not answer in time. Never sent, no fee spent.
Error on our side	Something went wrong before the trade was sent. Never sent, no fee spent.
Never sent	The trade never made it onto the wire. Nothing was signed or sent.
Expired before landing	Signed but never accepted by the network, and its window has closed.
Nothing left to sell	By the time this sell would have run, copying held none of the token.
Pool state changed	The pool moved between building the transaction and running it, so the chain rejected it. Reached the chain: the network fee was spent.
Failed on chain	Submitted and rejected. Any network fee is spent.

A skipped trade and a failed trade are different things. Skipped means a decision was taken and nothing was attempted. Failed means it was attempted: if it never reached the chain, nothing was spent, and if it reverted on chain, the network fee was.

What is not a control

Being clear about the limits of this page:

Nobody vets the creators. Following someone is a standing instruction to spend your money the way they spend theirs. See Traders you can copy.
Nothing here judges a token’s value. The safety checks are mechanical.
Nothing here caps your losses. A stop-loss you set is the only tool for that, and it is a best effort, not a floor.