Bracket Order

A bracket forces risk discipline into the order itself. You can't enter a trade without committing to a stop and a target. There's no "I'll set my stop after the fill" — the stop is placed atomically with the entry.

This matters most for prop firm trading because every account has rules like trailing drawdowns and daily loss limits. A bracket guarantees that even if you walk away from the screen, the worst-case loss is bounded.

OCO stands for "one cancels other." When the take-profit fills, the broker automatically cancels the stop-loss. When the stop fills, it cancels the take-profit. Without this link, you'd end up with an orphan order — your TP fills, but your stop sits live as a flat-to-short order.

Most platforms — Tradovate, NinjaTrader 8, MT4/5 — implement OCO natively at the broker level. The bracket isn't two independent orders; it's a managed group.

The most common failure: the copier mirrors the entry as a market order and then sends TP and SL as two separate orders on the follower — not as an OCO group. When the TP fills, the SL stays live. The follower now has an open short order with no protection.

The second most common failure: the copier doesn't propagate adjustments. You move your stop to break-even on the master. The followers' brackets stay at the original stop. A 2-tick win turns into a 10-tick loss on the followers because they're still wearing the original SL.

Both failures are silent. The follower account looks fine in the moment — the orders are there, the position is filled. The problem reveals itself only when the wrong side of the bracket triggers.

Real OCO bracket support on each follower (not just two independent orders). Mid-trade adjustment propagation (move a stop on master, follower stops move). Per-follower TP/SL offsets if you want each account tuned slightly differently. And partial-fill handling — if your master fills 2 of 3 contracts, the follower's bracket should size to 2 contracts, not 3.