In crypto, “copytrading” means automatically mirroring another trader’s positions. They buy, you buy. They sell, you sell. You’re outsourcing the decision-making to someone whose judgment you trust more than your own.

This is an underrated life strategy.

A friend recently told me he wished he’d started using Claude Code two months ago when I first mentioned it. I’d sent him a video where I described it as “pretty amazing” and said “this is gonna be crazy.” He didn’t act on it. Two months later, he’s kicking himself.

The correct move was to just… try it. Immediately. The cost of trying something a smart person recommends is almost always lower than the cost of ignoring it.

The Impolite Truth

You’d think my dumbest friends would copytrade me the most. They need the help, right?

It’s the opposite. My smartest friends copytrade me the hardest.

The impolite explanation is the correct one: dumb people aren’t smart enough to figure out who to copytrade. They have poor epistemics. They can’t distinguish good judgment from confident bullshit. They don’t track predictions. They don’t notice who’s consistently right.

It’s not primarily that they’re too proud or too insecure to copy others (though those come later, entrenching bad habits and justifying poor paths). It’s that they lack the basic pattern recognition required to identify who’s worth copying in the first place.

Meanwhile, smart people have spent years calibrating. They know who to trust on what. So when someone in their trust network recommends something with high conviction, they just… do it.

The “Just” Is Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting

“Life is at least 50% just figuring out who to copytrade.”

That “just” is ironic. This is not easy. It might be the hardest epistemic skill there is.

You need to:

  • Track people’s predictions and recommendations over time
  • Distinguish good judgment from good salesmanship
  • Identify domain-specific competence (someone great at tech recs might be terrible at relationship advice)
  • Update when track records change
  • Know when you’re the one with poor judgment about who has good judgment

That last one is the killer. There’s an epistemic paradox here: being confident in your copytrading choices requires being confident in your ability to evaluate judgment, which is itself a judgment call. Turtles all the way down.

The problem is that 90% of people have shitty judgment about who’s worth copytrading. And they don’t know it.

Some Heuristics (For Those Who Can Use Them)

Beware follower counts. Patrick McKenzie has 423 YouTube subscribers. He’s one of the highest-signal people in tech and finance. If you’re filtering by popularity, you’re selecting for entertainment value, not judgment quality.

Domain-specificity matters. Copytrade people in their domains of demonstrated competence. Your friend who’s great at career advice might be an idiot about investing.

If you’re not cutting back at least 10%, you’re not copytrading aggressively enough. (Adapted from Elon’s thing about firing.) I’ve never observed someone copytrading too much — copytrading the right people, anyway. If you’ve spent your 20s honing in on who’s worth listening to, double down in your 30s. No point endlessly searching for new sources.

A friend recently told me he’s narrowing his information diet. Doubling down on Zvi, ACX, a few others. His reasoning: he’s done the work of figuring out who’s worth reading. Time to harvest that investment, not keep shopping around.

The 2-hour test. If you’ve spent 2 hours with someone and haven’t formed a view on whether they’re copytrade-worthy, you’re failing at a basic life task. You should be constantly evaluating. And if you haven’t figured it out, they will — and should — cut you off. You’re wasting their time with your stasis.

The Asymmetry

The math almost always favours action:

Cost of trying something a smart person recommends: Usually trivial. Install some software. Read a book. Try a technique for a week.

Cost of not trying: Potentially enormous. Months of productivity gains. Career insights missed.

The downside is capped. The upside is open-ended.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Here’s the thing: I don’t think any of this is actionable advice.

If you have poor epistemics, telling you to “track predictions” won’t help. You’ll track the wrong things. You’ll follow some shitty health influencer who got lucky once and double down when they inevitably lead you astray. “Beware follower counts” becomes justification for following fringe cranks instead of recognising hidden gems.

The heuristics only work if you already have the underlying skill. Which means this post isn’t really advice — it’s a description of what smart people do naturally.

Maybe the best I can hope for is that smart people reading this recognise themselves and double down harder on the people they’ve already identified as worth copytrading. And dumb people… will continue copytrading poorly, if at all.

That’s bleak, but I think it’s true.

But If You Want to Try

If you’re reading that last section and feeling uncomfortable — good. That discomfort might be useful. Here are some questions worth sitting with:

  • How would I know if I’m wrong? If you can’t articulate what would change your mind about someone you’re copytrading, you’re not tracking — you’re just believing.

  • What do my smartest friends think of this person? Not your most agreeable friends. Your smartest ones. The ones who push back on you. If they think your guru is a clown, that’s data.

  • Would I bet money on their next prediction? Real money. Enough to hurt. If not, why are you following their advice?

  • When’s the last time this person admitted they were wrong? People with good judgment update. People performing confidence don’t.

I can’t give you good epistemics. But maybe these questions can give you a moment of doubt in the right places.