What's the difference between copy trading and forking a strategy?

Copy trading mirrors another person's trades in your account as they happen — you inherit their decisions in real time, opaque and unremovable: when they stop, you stop. Forking copies the strategy itself: the full rule set lands in your workspace where you can read every block, backtest it on any window, modify what you disagree with, and deploy your version under your own risk settings. Forking is to copy trading what having the recipe is to having someone cook for you. The verification layer matters too: on DeployQuant, a forked strategy's published stats come from platform-run backtests, so what you fork was measured honestly before you trusted it.