Investing can be intimidating when you don’t know what you’re doing. Wouldn’t it be great if you could copy someone…
For most people, keeping their investing simple by buying broad index funds is good enough to help them meet their long term goals. But some people prefer to play a more active role in their investing, and the internet has made it easier than ever before to start trading.
Trading is the buying and selling of anything.
And it’s possible to trade just about anything using what’s called ‘trading platforms’.
One such platform I’ve been looking at recently is eToro. Like many other trading platforms users can use the website to invest money in lots of different financial instruments. However, what’s special about eToro is you can see what other people are trading too and copy them if you wish!
Now, as you might have found out in school, just because you copy someone else’s work doesn’t mean they are always right, but eToro shows you how investors have done and the ones that prove themselves to be competent traders over time build up quite a following in the eToro ‘Popular Investors’ community.
One such trader, Jaynemesis, or Jay Smith to his friends, is a good example to learn about. He’s a 28 year old gamer who got interested in trading and found he was quite good at it. And now he has thousands of people copying his trades through the platform. The trades can be on anything from stocks and indices, to commodities and currencies, but Jaynemesis has a particular specialty in the trading of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. He’s made 85.35% profits over the last 12 months and his trading strategy is copied by 249 other users!
Regular readers of Magical Penny will know that I’ve experimented with BitCoin and doubled by money by the time I sold out. If I had not cashed out my 2 BitCoins would have been valued even higher now but at the time I needed the money for other things and what I didn’t know about Bitcoin was much more than I did know. I was worried about having my wallet hacked or losing my Bitcoins in some way. Had I been using eToro I would not have had the same worries as the buying and selling is integrated into the platform for ease-of-use.
For more information on Bitcoin see my post: What On Earth Is Bitcoin
Social Trading
When I was buying and selling BitCoin I felt alone in the process. It was interesting learning about it but I wasn’t really talking to anyone, other than blogging about it. With eToro, I could have been trading with the added social component – being able to communicate directly with other traders to ask questions, join online discussions and share knowledge and insight through an interactive, real-time news feed.
This can only lead to more informed investment decisions rather than pure speculation, a risk with trading and investing if you do not know what you are doing.
For many readers, trading is not something to rush into and you should only trade with money you can afford to lose. But if you’re curious and want to learn more through actually performing some trades or copying others, then eToro offers an excellent way to get started!
Happy Trading! You might even become the next Jaynemesis!
If trading is not something you’re interested in but you don’t want to miss out on market returns, have a read of other investing articles here on Magical Penny
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