| Updated: October 30, 2024Social Trading Performance and Ranking
This lesson will cover the following?
- How does it work?
- How can number lie?
- Final words
Heres how many people imagine copy trading when they first hear about it – you go to a Top 10 list, you choose a few traders and they start making money for you. After all, there is no other way, right? This is pure genius because those people are the best around for the moment, so theyre bound to make you money in the long run. You can just sit back and relax. Well, this is not how it works. This is not how it works at all.
How Does it Work?
Choosing a trader is a long and complicated process. You have to go through hundreds of profiles before you can find what youre looking for. Creating a person-based portfolio takes a lot of time and then an equal amount of management. You need to look at risk-management, money-management strategies, experience, gains, style and more, before you decide that you want to add a certain trader to your portfolio. Its not as simple as going to the Top 10 page and choosing the first five. This guarantees nothing. If you act based on the premise that these people are there for a reason and that they must be really good, then youre being lazy and you will be punished for it.
Social and copy trading arent for lazy people and we can prove it. Use your demo account and go to eToros “People” section and choose to copy the top five traders (you can choose the time period you feel the most with – three months, six months or a year). Make sure that youre using virtual money and not your actual portfolio because this will be one costly experiment. Now, copy the top give and just wait. On occasion look at how much theyre making for you. Dont manage anything – just sit back, relax, and see what happens. After all, if you think that this is the way to make money, then you might as well try it.
What you will find is that you will lose a lot (depending on how much youve invested). This is simply because the rankings arent as reliable as you think. Even eToro, themselves, state on the top of the ranking that past accomplishments dont guarantee future results. Most of these traders may have been profitable overall through the year, but that doesnt mean that theyre not losing right now. In fact, you will notice that you will be at a lost the moment you copy all their currently open trades (something wed suggest you never do unless youve checked them and you think theyll be profitable). Furthermore, there is a way to manipulate the numbers.
How Can Numbers Lie?
The rankings take many things into account – followers, copiers, gain, etc. However, this doesnt really mean anything. A trader with 5,000 followers can lose lots of money while one with three followers can win a lot (and vice versa). The number of followers or copiers doesnt directly indicate that the trader is good, but that the majority of people think that he is good. The same majority that in most cases doesnt know how to trade which means that its easy to think that a trader is much better than he actually is.
Furthermore, if a trader is on a winning streak, he may gain lots of followers and copiers as a result. Dont get us wrong – were not saying that traders who have many followers dont know what theyre doing but have just gotten lucky. They definitely know more than the people who follow them. But those people arent to always be trusted. The fact that many people think that something is good doesnt necessarily make it so (there was a point in time when most individuals thought the Earth was flat). All were saying is that you should carefully analyze the trader before you decide to follow just because “5,000 people cant be wrong”.
Take as many stats into consideration as you can. Also, its quite possible that a trader is inflating their gain by not closing losing trades. If you leave a losing trade, its not calculated because its not yet known if it will be a winning or a losing trade and how much the loss or profit will be. Lots of opened trades may indicate a long-term strategy or simply that the trader is trying to artificially improve his stats. Be careful. This is another reason why its dangerous to open all the current trades a trader has – you might unwittingly open 20-30 losing trades and end up with significant losses just because you clicked the “Copy” button.
Final Words
All were saying is that you should look at the picture. Dont think that you will copy a few traders and this will be the end of it. No, its just the beginning. Dont trust charts and rankings. Use the advanced filters and try to determine whether a trader is good or not for yourself. Take a look at open trades, overall portfolio – everything. Even then you cant be sure that he will make you money, but you will at least have given it your best, which will improve your chances.