facebookAnyone tried eToro before? Can you share your experiences? - Seedly

Advertisement

Anyone tried eToro before? Can you share your experiences?

Recently come across “copy people” feature in eToro. Basically the concept is following the portfolio of other people. Anyone try this platform before? Mind to share your experience?

Discussion (1)

What are your thoughts?

Learn how to style your text

Just at the point you can make money the software glitches and the stop loss function stops working. Then the take all your capital, there is no security in trading with this platform. The positions do not reflect the true market positions and this gives the scope to manipulate the position not relative to the market. I lost some money and what little I had left with them I decided to withdraw but I never received refund.
Most business these days is very good at selling products that don't work and etoro are very good at this. These types of company's should be stopped but they don't seem to be accountable to any law. It is a legalised scam, they are moderated so if you make money but not much then your a good statistic for them to show to the governing body but your profit is not going to be worth your worry over your capital or your time.

Lau YongLe

17 Mar 2020

Accountancy at Nanyang Technological University

Like what the rest says, eToro is a good playing ground where you get to copy popular investors. Kind of a no-brainer.

Always select copy open trades when copying anybody as the investors have most likely opened a ton of positions with a substantial amount of their balance into a portfolio of companies, currency pairings etc. Not doing so will lower the performance of your capital in most cases.

There are no commission fees for trades, but the spreads are less favourable as compared to other platforms. Withdrawal fees is fixed at USD 5 per withdrawal.

Read more about eToro: https://guidesify.com/blog/2017/03/16/top-ways-...

Like if it works!​​​

View 2 replies

Personally tried and lost a lot of money (about 20% of what I deposited).

Copy trade seems so brainless, just copy someone with returns of more than 10% or 20% in the past year and you know you're on your way to a Lambo.. right? Wrong.
Because the problems with copy trading are as follows:

  1. Time of entry - if you are to copy someone who started from a clean slate, that's fine.. but for someone who seemingly has a fantastic return of 20% so far, you need to be careful when u copy.. this is because you might be buying the same shares he owns, at a 20% premium of what he paid.
  2. Copy open trade or don't copy? so with point 1, you'll say, fine, then I don't copy open trade. But the catch is that most traders with good returns are hodlers, meaning, more than 90% of his cash is already in shares, hence, if u copy without the open trades, only 10% of ur cash is being used and the rest of the 90% are just sitting and doing nothing.
  1. Fund top up - another issue with some Traders have great results because they top up their funds which artificially inflates their returns. Imagine copying someone who has 95% in shares - that's good if the bull is running, but when the market is down, u don't have the buying power. That's when many investors start topping up their accounts, and basically, u can choose/don't choose to top up. If you do, you have to allocate to them more 'share' of your portfolio to them, if you do not, you can't follow the following trades with them. Big dilemma.
  1. Diversify your portfolio? - that's what they love to tell u, just diversify and u diversify ur risk - this thinking is not wrong, if I put $500 in 10 investors at a starting capital of $5,000, what can go wrong right? even if 1 loses all 100%, you would only lose 10% value. Easy to uds, but what if it was not the best strategy? Why? because there are 2 types of investors u can invest in, holders or Traders. If you allocate 50% or more to holders, when the market goes down, most of them go down. But why more than 50% to holders? Because they are less risky. If u allocate more to Traders (those who plays forex and etc), they tend to not have those 20-30% historical returns and hence, no certainty in returns. So in sum, diversity might be a double edge.

overall, maybe because I lost money that's why I'm salty. But my take is if all you Wan do is to copy trade, then go for something simple like auto wealth or stash away. Because after all, these ppl u put ur money with are retail investors.

finally, if you don't trust what I say. Try searching for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 TOP Traders. Most are never there to stay. Often, the 2016 guy is gone and probably non-existent by now.

Yes, I have been using it for about two years now for some of my trades. Initially used it mostly for cryptocurrency and CFD trades before they offering actual shares late last year.

Personally, I think it's a good playground to learn from the social trading aspects from some of the popular investors especially for beginners.
Let me summarise the pros and the cons of the platform from my experience:

Pros:

  1. The copy trade features allow a beginner to have a diversified portfolio by copying the trades of the selected popular investors.

  2. Additional income for becoming popular investors (having a certain number of copiers). There are different tiers of the PI which grant you different benefits.

  3. Low barrier of entry because they offer fractional shares

  4. No commissions for opening trades

Cons:

  1. There's a withdrawal fee of 50 USD for each withdrawal regardless of the amount.

  2. Fluctuations of the USD/SGD as the denominated currency is USD.

  3. There's been a trend of the delays in the market opening for the particular stocks when they experiencing a big surge/dip. For example, says a US company had a good Q3 earnings call and has a premarket surge in the price, Etoro will delay the market opening for that stocks so you can't trade at all.

  4. The platform reliability could be questionable due to point 3 as I mentioned.

Just my two cents and hope it helps! :)

View 2 replies

Nicholes Wong

02 Jan 2019

Diploma in Business Management at Nanyang Polytechnic

Just saying eToro might be CFD trading (contract for difference) not stock trading they are differen...

Write your thoughts

Advertisement