Copying other good traders (Copy People)
This is the simplest way to invest on eToro and so the most recommended path for beginners (read Liam's story). When you copy someone, every trade they execute is simultaneously opened in your account too and then closed when they close it.
It’s all proportional to what % of your total account’s funds you choose to allocate to them (more on this later), but ultimately you will achieve the same rate of return as they do.
Finding reliable traders to copy on eToro isn’t always as straightforward as it might appear. You need to know what to look for and what to stay clear of (more on this later on). Allow me to help you master the art of copy trading…
Avoid the most common mistakes!
Let me point out the numero uno mistake beginners make right away: being a sheep. When you venture into the ‘ Copy People’ section looking for a trader to copy it’s intuitive to sort by ‘most copied’ and blindly copy the top results. You’d think that the most copied people have lots of copiers for a reason, right? The wisdom of the crowd perhaps.
But the reality is that most people on eToro are complete beginners and don’t really know what they are doing. If a few people copy a trader for the wrong reasons, that trader can quickly ‘go viral’ with exponentially more copiers following suit without thinking for themselves. Let me give you an example.
A popular yet under-performing eToro trader
Even though this trader has extremely poor performance (he would have lost 98% of your money over the last five months if you’d copied him), he still has close to 2,000 people copying him! Bizarrely this happens quite a lot on eToro, so I’ll be explaining the process I follow when copy trading.
Having warned against consistently under-performing traders, the other big pitfall beginners fall into is over-trading. It’s incredibly tempting to keep checking how much you’ve made or lost every few hours, but emotions will cloud your better judgement and lead to tinkering.
No trader will EVER profit every single week or month, so I highly recommend you take a medium/long-term approach. This requires patience and discipline, but you’re more likely to see better gains over time.
Finding the best traders to copy
First off click on ‘Copy People’ on the eToro sidebar.
You can either simply scroll down the page to see promising and trending popular investors…
…or you can use the advanced search feature. Everything in blue you can change to meet the criteria you're seeking in potential traders to copy.
Hit ‘GO!' for a list of matching traders, ordered by number of copiers they have. To further drill down use the filters at the top.
