Managed account, PAMM or signals: which route does what?

Three decisions before the return

Two offers can show similar performance while putting the investor in very different arrangements. Write down who holds the money, who can place trades and who can authorise a withdrawal. Those three answers are more useful than a label on a sales page.

A manager, an allocation or an instruction

In a managed-account arrangement, a manager may receive authority to trade an investor’s account under an agreed mandate. This includes private one-to-one mandates. PAMM usually describes percentage allocation of results; MAM describes a way of managing multiple accounts. Neither abbreviation by itself defines your legal rights. The agreement and broker implementation do that. LAMM describes lot-based management or replication; the exact sizing rules depend on the service. These are subtypes within our managed-accounts section.

Signals provide trade instructions; a copying service can automate their execution. You may keep an account in your own name while delegating decisions about what gets traded. That is still a meaningful investment risk. A platform review and a manager review answer different questions.

Compare the complete arrangement

• Account: exact legal entity, jurisdiction and permitted service.
• Trading: instruments, leverage, maximum exposure and authority to change strategy.
• Economics: all charges, including performance fees and execution costs.
• Exit: stopping new trades, closing old ones and withdrawing cash are separate steps.

The useful next step

Ask each provider to answer the same questions in writing. An attractive return with an unclear account agreement should remain an incomplete comparison. Do not treat a familiar platform name as a substitute for reviewing the person or strategy using it.

For a concrete allocation example, FXOpen’s documentation describes an investment account and manager-specific offer conditions. That illustrates why the offer, rather than the acronym, is the document to read.