How to Trade on eToro Social Trading Platform?

Last Updated : Sunday 20th October 2019

Written By Tim Baudin
Forex Trading Instructor

Want to trade Forex for living or just for some additional support income?

Maybe you are a busy person and with personal commitments, business deals and regular work hours cramping your schedule, you find a little time to give to trading Forex.

But this does not mean that you cannot earn and get profitable margins!

First, let’s understand basics of social trading.

What is a Social Trading Platform?

The idea behind creating social trading platform was

“what if you could bring the advantage of the wisdom of many traders in a collective format to make fundamental investment decisions?"

This is what social trading is all about – Connecting on a global network with traders and investors around the world, following their ideas and experiences and using them to make your own investing decisions.

The Need of a Social Trading Platform

How to get started with the social trading platform?

Getting Started with eToro : Step by Step

1. Join eToro - Social Trading Network

It’s very simple & free. You can use either your Facebook account , Google account or with your details like username, password, email & phone number.

Join Now

65% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

2. Deposit

Now you don’t require to make deposit straight away if you don’t want. But you can only copy someone if you have min a $100 in your account. It’s better to start with $200 or $300 which allows you to copy 2 or 3 traders to diversify your portfolio.

You can deposit either through any major credit cards or any choice of alternate payment systems like such as Skrill, PayPal, Neteller, and WebMoney.

You can deposit using following currencies at present : USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD

eToro also runs various promotional offers time to time.

You'll get an email with your Promotion code

3. Get Understanding in using eToro Platform

Newsfeed

Similar to Facebook, you get to know all activities for traders you are following.

Portfolio

This is the place to view all your open trades and monitor your performance.

Watchlist

Here you can add people or markets you are interested in knowing more. You can have multiple lists.

People

This section allows you to filter people to whom you would like to copy based on various criteria.

Markets

Place to trade or research various markets like Forex, Stocks, Indices, Commodities and EFTs

1. Copying The Best Traders of eToro

This is the best way to start for a beginner. When you copy a trader, their trades are automatically copied to your account.

2. Trading with eToro Yourself without Copying Other Traders

Once you are familiar with the eToro trading platform, you can also trade yourself directly for Stocks, Indices, Forex, Commodities, and ETFs.

3. Become a Popular Investor

Anyone and everyone can become a Popular Investor on eToro – This do acts as an incentive for responsible trading and being an active part of the community. Even having just one copier starts getting your additional commission.

Become an eToro Popular Investor and build your own online financial business and earn a 2% management fee.

It can take a while to get a number of followers but it’s not hard if you are making consistent solid profitable traders. By being active on the network, taking part in discussions, answering other people’s questions etc. can get your name out inside community quickly.

How to Select the Best Forex Traders to Copy on eToro

Avoid the mistakes of blindly following and copy the ‘most copied’ trader.

Selecting the right forex traders on eToro is a crucial step because this is how you avoid losses and get a profitable share of trade on this platform. There are dozens of traders to select and follow, and you can always view their profile to get a detailed analysis of their regular performance over the months.

If you are willing to learn from the best and follow the top traders on the block, here are some tips and guidelines you should have in mind:

Look for traders who have been trading for a while now (at least 6 months) and are active in the feed, blogs, and discussions. It ensures that amazing gain was not just out of luck.
If you are not willing to bank upon risky traders, look out for red flags in their trading history. This indicates that they lost their equity at some point and this shows that it may be risky to embark upon them.

Also, look for weekly and daily drawdowns. Anything more than 10% is sure sign of red flag.
The gain ratio percentage can often be misleading. If the winning ratio of a trades is 100% or even greater than 90%, this does not usually mean a good thing.

This is an indicator of the fact that they left the position open until it became profitable, which will make you lose your capital as they widen their stop levels.
Follow gurus who don’t leave their trade positions open for a long period of time. Short term eToro traders are the ones that get you the best profit.

Instead, look out for gurus who are prone to cut down their losses when the trade is not likely to work. Understand that trading is not always profitable. There will always be bad days.
When looking at the performance graph, keep an eye out for a slow yet steady growth and not sudden drops and rises over a period of time.

A consistent upward graph is more reliable than gurus with graphs that have sudden peaks and drops, even if they have been profitable for the present year.
Understand the guru’s strategy and check if you can relate to them and can look up to them. This is the whole point of trading on eToro –copying someone who you think is worth following!

Check how much communicative they are. If they are not replying to your message than either they don’t want to share their knowledge or may be worse don’t do what they doing !

Evaluate Traders Performance and Trading Behavior

To create people based portfolio according to trading style that suits you, the users stats page is one the most important page for you to decide if you should copy or not.

The stats page is built out of 5 cards:

Performance
Risk
Copiers
Trading
Additional info

Checking Trader's Past Performance

Here you can see full history based on months, years etc for that particular trader. This will give you idea about the consistency of profit and loss for any trader you are interested in.

There are two other important things to look. 'Risk score' shows risk the trader is taking and it's on scale 1 to 10. 1 means very low risk. 10 means very high risk. 'Max Drawdown' shows the greatest loss for this account equity during selected period (daily, weekly, all-time)

How to start copying?

One you have found any trader whom you like to copy , just open their profile page and click “Copy” button just below their profile.

Enter amount with which you want to copy. You can also set a “stop loss”, which protect you against heavy loss. It’s 40% by default. So, if trader you copying loses 40% of your total investments than you automatically stop copying them.

Monitoring your total Portfolio Performance

Inside your “Portfolio” page, you can view your all open trades.

You can close an individual trade without stop copying a trader here.

CopyFunds

Managing Forex Trading Risks with eToro

Risk and money management while trading on eToro is an important consideration to take. Though copying other traders gives you an absolute edge and share on their profits, it also entitles you to a portion of the losses they incur.

Therefore, it is extremely important to select right traders to copy and monitor their performance to keep an eye on your assets. Following are some handy tips that can help you evade major losses and ensure a safe and profitable Forex trading experience.

For a rough calculation of the amount of risk that you face when copying an investor, here’s a simple formula. If for example you are allocating 10% of your funds to a trader and they risk 5% on a trade on their account, then a 0.5% of your total balance is automatically risked.

Therefore, it is important that you take a look at your trader's trading history and then decide on the amount that you allocate on their funds to face minimum risks on your account.
For most gurus, the profile shows a “Risk Breakdown” analysis, which shows how many of their previous trades were either “low”, “medium” or “high” risk.
In case the analysis is not shown, a manual method to calculate their risk factor is to start copying them through virtual money in a demo account.

Look at their “open trades” and “history” tabs and the “amount” and “units” will indicate how much they risked on their trades. Here the pip risk indicates how much the trader won or lost when the market moved up or down 1 pip in general.

Traders who trade on a daily basis stop 100 pips away while long term traders may use 500 pips. Copying such long term traders is generally not advised because they lock in your funds and may cause you losses.
There is an option of copying the open trades of a guru once you start following them. One should understand that open trades that comprise a few weeks or even months are generally going into a loss and it is not a smart move to copy them.

Therefore, one should always uncheck the option of copying the previously open trades of a trader.

Withdrawal

There is withdrawal fee with eToro based on amount you want to withdraw

Withdrawal Amount USD	Fee USD
50.00 +	25.00

Tips for Trading Forex with eToro Platform

FAQs

Why do I need to verify my account with eToro?

As eToro is a regulated broker by FCA and CySEC, it's legal requirement for them to verify all traders. A verified trader can make unlimited deposit and withdrawal. This also comes with faster approval.

What is the Least Amount Needed to Begin Copying?

You can start copying a trader with as little as $100 or up to all of your account balance.

Does it Cost me to Follow or Copy a Trader?

No, it does not! You can start following and copying as many traders as you want and intensify your trading experience to the max. eToro makes money through a portion of the bid/ask spread of the trades you place. The spread is same in both cases either if you trading yourself or copying someone.

How to stop copying a trader?

It can be easily done through Openbook portfolio. Any o

pen traders you copied from this investor will be automatically closed as well.

How Much Risk is undertaken by Social Forex Trading?

The Forex social trading like any other market, the margins for risk and profit of trading and investing is susceptible to rise and fall due to many different factors and any industry or trend changes.

All traders are advised to research all investments and financial trading opportunities thoroughly to minimize the risk factor.

Social trading platforms have their own regulatory scans and risk management features that control and assists all users. These services differ greatly depending upon the network chosen so investors should choose wisely.

What can be traded through eToro?

eToro is a social platform focusing on the trade of commodities, indices and Forex on a global scale. All items that are classified under these groups are available for social trading purposes.

Is Previous Experience in Trading required by eToro?

eToro’s social platform is renowned for its simplicity and ease of use. These factors appeal to people because eToro created its platform with the assumption that anyone who signs up is new to social trading.

Programmed with this thought, the platform intuitively regulates the mechanics while allowing users to focus on the trading aspects of the platform.

Previous experience is not required for new users but it is highly recommended that new users opt for registering in Practice Trading to get familiar with the platform before graduating on to Real Trading.

You can also read our guide "7 Steps to Getting Started In Forex Trading" to learn about forex trading in general.

Is it possible to copy more than one investor?

It’s a good idea to copy more than one trader to reduce risk. You can copy up to 20 investors at a given time.

Connect with over 8 million investors

in the world’s leading social investment network

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CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 65% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

Highly volatile investment product. Trading cryptocurrencies is not supervised by any EU regulatory framework. Past performance is not an indication of future results. The content is intended for educational purposes only and should not be considered as an investment advice.