This Social Trading Platform Lets You 'Copy' Other Master Traders

Ninety-four percent of the world’s wealth belongs to the richest 20 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. That means that the poorest 80 percent are sharing six percent of the world’s wealth between them. To put things into even more perspective, the 42 richest people in the world have a combined wealth equivalent to the poorest 3.7 billion, or half the entire global population.

Suffice to say, it’s an unfair world. The wealth gap continues to widen, but fintech companies are evening out the playing field by giving users easier access to the world of trading. One way this is being done is through the social trading route.

“Social trading is now democratizing participation in stocks and other assets trading,” said Paul Familiaran, Southeast Asia business head of eToro, one of the world’s leading social trading platforms. “eToro is achieving this by ‘socializing’ the prerequisite financial analysis.”

It’s no secret that the old wealth management system is notorious for its lack of transparency, control, and impersonality. New wealth management modes, like social trading, cure these cons by providing accessibility, personalization, and convenience at a lower cost.

“It is much akin to the sharing economy brought mainstream, of course, by the likes of Uber and Airbnb,” said Familiaran

eToro works like a social network, allowing its 10 million trader-users across 140 countries to interact and share information. Like Facebook, users have a profile/portfolio and a newsfeed with the addition of a trade market where they can track international markets. Each stock profile is also accompanied by compiled commentary and research from financial experts to ensure that traders make educated investments.

Unlike other platforms, eToro “fractionalizes a fraction,” meaning traders have the option to purchase only parts of a stock instead of the whole. They can also set the “Stop Loss” and “Take Profit” functions on the platform, which automatically stop trades if they earn or lose a particular amount as part of eToro’s safety net measures.

The assets up for trading on the eToro platform include stocks, exchange-traded funds, currencies, indices, commodities, as well as the cryptocurrencies that have been taking the finance sector by storm. According to Familiaran, more than 80 percent of their newly registered users from Southeast Asia have invested in cyptoassets.

Perhaps the most appealing factor of eToro is its patented social copy trading technology, which allows traders, particularly newbies or passive traders, to mirror the trading decisions of successful, popular traders on the platform. Success in copy trading hit a profitability rating of 73 percent in 2018. Users can also follow market portfolios and partner portfolios if they’d prefer to invest in a particular set of companies.

As of now, the platform currently has an estimated 10,000 Filipino registered users, according to Familiaran. There are currently no Filipino companies listed on the platform, but Filipino users will be able to access international markets and invest—and hopefully earn—in stocks from mega corporations such as Apple and Google.

Equipped with copy trading technology, the platform is basically the world’s largest community of money managers that doesn’t hire any fund managers.

There’s no guarantee in earning profit when playing with the stock market. Risk is, after all, part of the game. But with fractionalized stocks, copy trading, and automated stop functions made accessible to the public, the odds now play in the trader’s favor.