How to follow the Altcopy Index by hand

Until a vault of vaults automates it, following the Altcopy Index is something you do by hand — and that's genuinely fine. It's a handful of deposits, on your own keys, with full control over every one. Here's the whole process, start to finish.

Nothing here is advice. It's a recipe for acting on a transparent recommendation, with your own money and your own judgment. Read what the leaderboard is first if you haven't.

Step 1 — Read today's basket

Open the leaderboard. It opens on the Index view by default. You'll see the member vaults, each with a weight (today, equal across members) and a small style badge telling you which lens qualified it — aggressive, balanced, or income. That's your shopping list.

Note the TVL column as you read. You'll need it in Step 3.

Step 2 — Decide your total, and your split

Pick the total amount you're allocating to the Index sleeve of your portfolio. Then split it across the members. The simplest, most honest split is the one the Index itself uses: equal weight — same amount in each. The fit scores are bunched tightly enough that pretending you can rank the 4th member above the 5th is false precision.

You don't have to take all of them. If a name doesn't sit right with you, skip it and equal-weight the rest. It's your basket; the Index is the default, not a rule.

Step 3 — Check you're not too big for the small ones

This is the one step people skip, and it's the one that matters at size. The Index never puts more than 40% of a vault's TVL into any single vault, for a good reason: become half of a small vault and you can't get out cleanly, and your own money degrades the strategy.

So before you deposit, do the quick check: your allocation to any vault should stay well under 40% of its TVL. If equal-weighting would make you, say, 60% of a $100k vault, cap that one and spread the difference. If you're investing real size, this is the whole ballgame — I wrote a dedicated piece on how the Index behaves past $1M, and it's worth reading before you deploy.

Step 4 — Deposit, on Hyperliquid, on your keys

Now you act — on Hyperliquid's own interface, not mine. For each vault on your list, find it on Hyperliquid and deposit your chosen amount. If you've never made a Hyperliquid deposit, I walked through the whole thing in a step-by-step first-deposit guide.

Your money stays in your wallet's control the whole time — this is the part that makes it different from old-school copy trading. You're depositing into each manager's vault directly; nobody, including me, ever holds your funds.

Step 5 — Rebalance when the basket changes

The Index re-derives every snapshot, so membership drifts. You don't need to babysit it daily — checking in every couple of weeks is plenty. When you look:

• A vault left the Index (dropped below the score, closed to deposits, or went dormant)? Consider withdrawing from it and redeploying.
• A vault joined? Consider adding it at your equal weight.
• Everything stable? Do nothing. Churn has costs; don't trade for the sake of it.

The honest caveats

A few things to keep in your eyes, not your blind spot. Some vaults have lock-ups or close to deposits without warning — the leaderboard flags the closed ones, but always confirm on Hyperliquid before you commit. Every vault charges its own fee, so you're paying each manager directly. And the Index is a recommendation built from public data, recomputed honestly — it is not a guarantee. Vaults can and do die; that's the entire reason the leaderboard exists.

That's the whole job. Read the basket, size it sanely, deposit on your keys, check back occasionally. When the vault of vaults arrives, it'll do all five steps for you — but you don't have to wait for it to start.

Today's basket is waiting: open the leaderboard.

Part of the Hyperliquid vault leaderboard series.