How do you copy the best traders? The best copy traders signal providers typically have a large following, an established track record of performance i. Try to look at more than just the absolute returns when comparing the best traders to copy.

Depending on your goals, it can also be important to find the right balance of diversification. Pro tip: You should always consider the time horizon or, expected duration of your investment when copying another trader.

Copy trading is like any investment, in the sense that you can either make money or lose money. Your profitability is determined by which traders you follow, as well as the timing of when you copy their trades — both of these factors will affect any resulting profits or losses. You should assess the profitability of each trader before choosing which one to follow, and remember: just because a trader is making money at a particular time doesn't mean it's the best time to copy them.

As the market adage goes, "Past performance is not indicative of future results. Start with a small amount of capital, and do thorough research before committing to a strategy. The best trading system to copy isn't necessarily the most profitable. It is crucial to align your risk parameters with the strategy that best suits your investment goals. For example, a more conservative investor may choose a system with a lower average loss per trade, relative to the average profit.

On the other hand, a more aggressive investor may choose a strategy that has higher volatility, which means a higher risk for losses — but also higher relative potential profits. Many modern copy trading forex platforms contain hundreds or even thousands of signal providers.

As a result, it can be difficult for traders to decide who to follow. Thus, it is always important to do research, start with a small amount, and never risk more than you are willing to lose. While it may sound like a good idea to automate your trading strategy, copy trading still requires active account management — it's not a quick fix or an easy way to make money.

Though it's not for everyone, copy trading can help you diversify your existing portfolio when used correctly, and the best copy-trade brokers will offer tools to help you manage your account.

Whether or not copy trading is a good idea for you will depend on your preferences, overall goals, risk tolerances, and what percentage of your portfolio you plan on allocating to copy trading. Copy trading still requires you to work when setting it up because it's considered a self-directed account in most countries, compared to a set-it and forget-it investment fund or other passive investments where other people make investment decisions for you.

Copy trading can be good for beginners, provided they learn the basics and approach copy trading the same way they would any other self-directed trading account. That being said, copy trading is not a replacement for your trading needs — regardless of your experience level. Instead, copy trading should be thought of as a way to complement your portfolio and existing trading tool arsenal.

Check out our popular guide to forex trading for beginners. We'll help you pick a forex broker that's great for beginners, and give you an educational introduction to forex world. Prudent beginners will analyze all available performance metrics when deciding whether or not to copy a particular trader. Overall, copy trading can have its place for beginners — so long as they take full responsibility for managing their choices.

Beginners who adopt copy trading can adopt good practices, such as keeping track of their account performance to make changes as needed, but copy trading is not a replacement for self-directed trading, and should not be thought of as a passive investment or managed account.

The trade size in your account may be smaller or larger, depending on how you configured your account when initially subscribing to copy each investor. Pro tip: Once you find one or more traders you wish to copy from within a copy trading platform, you will need to decide whether you want to only take on any new trades they establish, or immediately copy any of their pre-existing positions that may already be open. There may be additional parameters that you can configure — such as the maximum amount of risk you are willing to take for each trader you copy — and other controls that may affect how you manage your account when copy trading these can vary depending on the copy trading platform you use.

Besides choosing a trader with good historical results, it's important to look at the performance statistics for each system, such as the amount of risk taken maximum drawdown and average trade size, duration, and frequency of trades. Some investors select more than one strategy, but having enough capital and choosing the right risk parameters if any is crucial when you copy trade forex strategies. Remember, copy trading is risky. Never invest more money than you are willing to lose.

Yes, copy trading really works, and you can verify the proof by checking the results of the best-performing traders. Likewise, there are traders that do lose money when copy trading. Copying a trader who has a successful track record or history of positive returns is no guarantee that you will succeed, although it can help increase the probability of making money compared to copying a trader that has poor historical performance.

Pro tip: The tools available for analyzing traders and managing risk can vary widely across copy trading platforms, and database biases may come into play for example, recency bias, which can lead to simply following the trader currently performing best, which is not always the best choice.

In addition, investors may be led astray by strategy drift — which is when a trader deviates from the strategy that led to their historical performance, which can produce unexpected results. The key to success is to do your research and keep up to date with your account performance, and intervene when necessary if copy trading doesn't work for you.

Understanding how social copy trading networks calculate trading performance is an essential aspect of successful copy trading, as it affects the ordering of trader rankings.

The method used to measure and track profit and loss also influences trade copiers. Instant backfill bias is just one example of the challenges social trading technology developers face if they permit traders to instantly upload their entire trading history at the click of a button. Such challenges have been known for years, and thanks to broker procedures, regulation, and robust technology, these concerns are mostly non-issues, especially for top-rated forex brokers.

Nonetheless, if in doubt, it's always prudent to check and ask questions. eToro Review is a winner for its easy-to-use copy-trading platform where traders can duplicate the trades of investors across over instruments, including exchange-traded securities, forex, CFDs, and popular cryptocurrencies. AvaTrade is a trusted global brand best known for offering traders an extensive selection of trading platform options. Our testing found AvaTrade to be great for copy trading, competitive for mobile, mostly in line with the industry average for pricing and research, and a winner for investor education.

Here are the Overall rankings for the 39 online brokers who participated in our Annual Review, sorted by Overall ranking. Was this helpful? Yes or No. At ForexBrokers. com, our evaluations of online brokers and their products and services are based on our collected quantitative data as well as the qualitative observations and qualified opinions of our expert researchers.

Each year we publish tens of thousands of words of research on the online forex brokerage industry, and we evaluate dozens of international regulator agencies click here to learn about how we calculate Trust Score.

In order to assess the best brokers for copy trading, we conduct extensive research on a wide variety of copy trading platforms and services. We test copy trading platforms as provided by the online brokers themselves, and evaluate the overall proprietary social copy trading experience, and we test copy trading services offered by third-party providers. We also examine the costs of these services, to determine whether these costs are folded into the spread or charged as standalone fees or subscriptions, for example.

All websites and web-based platforms are tested using the latest version of the Google Chrome browser. Our Desktop PCs run Windows 11, and we use MacBook Pro laptops running macOS Ultimately, our rigorous data validation process yields an error rate of less than. Click here to learn more about how we test.

There is a very high degree of risk involved in trading securities. With respect to margin-based foreign exchange trading, off-exchange derivatives, and cryptocurrencies, there is considerable exposure to risk, including but not limited to, leverage, creditworthiness, limited regulatory protection and market volatility that may substantially affect the price, or liquidity of a currency or related instrument.

It should not be assumed that the methods, techniques, or indicators presented in these products will be profitable, or that they will not result in losses.

Read more on forex trading risks. Steven Hatzakis is the Global Director of Research for ForexBrokers. Steven previously served as an Editor for Finance Magnates, where he authored over 1, published articles about the online finance industry.

A forex industry expert and an active fintech and crypto researcher, Steven advises blockchain companies at the board level and holds a Series III license in the U. as a Commodity Trading Advisor CTA. Blain Reinkensmeyer has 20 years of trading experience with over 2, trades placed during that time. He heads research for all U. com and is respected by executives as the leading expert covering the online broker industry.

John Bringans is the Senior Editor of ForexBrokers. An experienced media professional, John has close to a decade of editorial experience with a background that includes key leadership roles at global newsroom outlets. Joey Shadeck is the Content Strategist and Research Analyst for ForexBrokers. He holds dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Oakland University, and has been an active trader and investor for close to ten years.

An industry veteran, Joey obtains and verifies data, conducts research, and analyzes and validates our content. com is committed to the highest ethical standards and reviews services independently. Learn How We Make Money. Home Forex Guides Directory. October 21, Pros Large number of investors to copy Extensive range of markets to trade User-friendly platforms and app Cons No automated trading strategies Stops, limits mandatory on trades Research trails competitors.

Pros AvaOptions app is an excellent forex options mobile trading platform Offers 44 forex options and over 1, CFDs Cons Pricing for retail accounts is average, but trails industry leaders Desktop platform is slow to load, has outdated design. Pros Large selection of third-party copy trading platforms Competitive pricing for active traders using Razor accounts Cons Selection of markets trails industry leaders No interactive courses, progress tracking or educational quizzes.

Pros Ranks among best MetaTrader brokers Multiple copy trading platforms Cons Trails industry leaders in apps and research Education falls short. Profesor Pips Well-known member. interesting,,,,,,, you promote low risk trading on outside web , but you risking pips and your profit target is 20 pips, this is safe?

louisegoodman Well-known member. If you enter forex trading depending on copy trades, your trading career will not last for long. A copy trade can earn you a profit only in a few favorable conditions, but that cannot become your strategy. You need to work on making your strategy that will set a trend in your favor. Otherwise, it will be impossible to sustain in the market.

Kristine Christensen Member. One can be successful in forex trading by copying the trades of successful forex traders. This is called copy trading and can be done on a lot of different platforms. Snicket Active member. Not sure what others have to say about it but copy trading is for the lazy traders. For as long as I can understand the market and make my trading decisions in accordance with that, I will keep building my strategies and following them.

Zeitgeist Active member. It is easy to copy trades. But what comes easy does have its own drawbacks too. While copying trades, the trader will not learn much. The trader will not develop any decision making skills or we can say no trading skills will be learned.

Unless the source of copying is perfect which never could be, there are high chances of losing money. Thaumatology Member. There isn't a surety that copy trading is going to make you money. It totally depends on the trading skills of the trader from whom your trades are going to be copied from.

Remember there is no trader who is perfect and very few of the best traders would want their trades copied. So, there is a high chance that you will lose money in copy trading.

Accretion Member. Honestly, copy trading is not the best way to trade if you are serious about attaining the long-term benefits of being a forex trader. It has some pros for new traders. Copy trading can help them learn and earn. Traders can utilise copy trading to understand how strategies work and then create their own. There is a dependency factor and it is very difficult to find genuine master copy traders.

Unellene Active member. Observing and learning the market is the best thing you can do to be profitable in forex trading. Copy Trading can teach you a lot of interesting things about the market.

You just have to know what kind of people to copy and be able to make the most out of it. Until you try the trading signals of other traders yourself, it will be very difficult to say whether it is worth using them at all.

that work are fairly easy losing trades. Riffraff Active member. There are a lot of scammers who lure traders into buying fake courses and signals. Even the telegram channels traders join are not reliable. Copy trading has some benefits, as you said. But traders need to be very careful. Paulsy Well-known member. Copy trading is a popular trading strategy and a form of portfolio management that inexperienced forex traders use to make trading decisions without researching on their own.

It is the process of emulating an expert's trading activity. Copying trades is becoming increasingly popular as it allows traders with minimum experience to make money. Choosing the best copytrade platform is a fundamental factor to establishing your investment objectives and managing the risks. geraldinemarsh Well-known member. I don't think copy trading is for traders who want to have a long profitable career. Copy trading must be done only until you want to get an idea of the market or to check how professional traders trade.

Once you have learnt that, you must move ahead with your own trading plan. It's better and more beneficial in the long run. WalletInvestor Well-known member. I've always been wary of copy trading as well.

It's not always a bad idea, I have heard some good stories but copy trading sounds like I would be essentially putting control over my money into someone else's hands, and that sounds a bit too risky. Extreme Ways said:. I think it's important to build trust between the copy trading provider and subscribers.

Written by Steven Hatzakis , Blain Reinkensmeyer Edited by John Bringans Fact-checked by Joey Shadeck. The ForexBrokers. com annual forex broker review six years running is the most cited in the industry. With over 50, words of research across the site, we spend hundreds of hours testing forex brokers each year. Here's how we test. Forex copy trading — also known as social trading, mirror trading, or auto trading — has been growing in adoption and general popularity for over a decade.

Industry information, financial news, and market analysis now all propagate at lightning speed — thanks in part to social media and an increasingly faster web experience. These factors, together with the power of the crowd and advanced sentiment data, help to power social copy trading platforms, and the popularity of these platforms has soared as investors generate trading signals and enter the market with new positions that people want to copy.

CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

The idea of copy trading is simple: use technology to copy the real-time forex trades forex signals of other live investors forex trading signal providers you want to follow. This way, every time they trade, you can automatically replicate copy their trades in your brokerage account.

Here are the best forex brokers for copy trading, based on our testing of 39 brokers across variables. eToro is a winner for its easy-to-use copy-trading platform, where traders can copy the trades of experienced investors — or receive exclusive perks for sharing their own trading strategies. eToro expertly merges self-directed trading and copy trading under a unified trading experience. Read full review. AvaTrade is a trusted global brand that offers an impressive selection of trading platforms, exceptional educational content, and average pricing and research.

Our testing found AvaTrade to be great for copy trading, with AvaSocial, ZuluTrade, and DupliTrade available. Pepperstone offers a growing range of tradeable markets, good-quality research, and support for multiple social copy trading platforms. It offers both MetaTrader and cTrader, and its wide range of available third-party tools and plugins enhances its already-impressive suite of available platforms.

While Vantage trails industry leaders in areas such as research and education, its MetaTrader offering is bolstered by content powered by Trading Central and a proprietary mobile app. FXCM is a good choice for copy trading with its support for ZuluTrade, and a great choice for traders who appreciate advanced trading tools and quality research — though its range of markets remains fairly narrow, and pricing at FXCM is just average.

Tickmill is most valuable to high-volume, high-balance traders who want to trade only the most popular forex and CFD instruments. FP Markets offers competitive pricing and a decent range of social copy trading tools and platforms. Many of the early pioneers in social trading technology started out as third-party platform developers, such as Tradency, ZuluTrade, and eToro. While some of these firms are still independent service providers, or ISPs , others went in a new direction.

stock trading offering at our sister site, StockBrokers. Today, thanks to precise legal definitions and ever-evolving trading technology, regulators in nearly every jurisdiction consider copy trading to be self-directed — because the client must decide who to copy, even if the copying happens automatically for each signal. Using our forex brokers comparison tool , here's a summary of the trading platforms offered by the best copy trading brokers.

Our testing found that eToro is the best copy trading platform available in , compared to the range of platforms available from brokers and third-party provides such as ZuluTrade, cTrader, the MetaTrader Signals market, DupliTrade, and Myfxbook.

In the above video walkthrough, we demonstrate how simple it is to find and select a signal provider in eToro's CopyTrader. We scroll through the signal provider's profile which includes the trader's Overview, Stats, Portfolio, and Charts , and then we select how much to allocate towards copying the trader.

Overall, eToro is our top pick for social copy trading and cryptocurrency trading in Check out our full-length eToro review to see video walkthroughs of eToro's user-friendly web platform and well-designed mobile app — both of which are great for casual investors and beginners. Copy trading is legal in most countries, as long as the broker itself is properly regulated. When investing in financial markets through a regulated broker, there are procedures in place during the account opening process that should ensure it is legal for you to trade depending on your country of residence.

Yes, copy trading is legal in the U. For cryptocurrency copy trading, your broker must be a registered Money Services Business MSB and licensed by FinCEN. In legal terms, copy trading is typically treated as a self-directed account. Before copy trading existed, a power of attorney form was required to authorize a fund manager to trade on your behalf.

Today, individual investors agree to a Letter of Direction LoD , which is a form that authorizes the broker to copy the trades of other traders automatically based on your explicit instruction. That said, in certain countries, there are still restrictions. In the U. The following U. To do your own copy trading, start by selecting the traders whose trades you want to copy.

Traders who share their real-time trades for the purpose of copy trading are known as signal providers. Each user, or trader, can decide to which degree they want to copy the signal provider. Copy trading platforms allow users to automatically copy the trades of available signal providers in real-time using individually customized account settings and platform tools. Each copy trading platform provides its own set of optional controls to protect investors. For example, you can customize the amount of capital at risk for each signal provider that you are copying.

This way users can set a maximum drawdown limit to prevent losses from going beyond their risk tolerance threshold. How to copy trade in 7 steps: Compare performance rankings and statistics from among the traders that are available to be copied. Analyze and compare the remaining candidates and decide which to copy, if any , and determine how much of your balance to allocate towards copying each trader. Once you are comfortable with the settings you have configured, click to copy trade the traders you have decided to follow.

Monitor the performance of your trading account as often as needed, depending on the frequency of trades established in your copy trading account. Adjust your parameters and subscriptions as conditions change such as signal provider performance, or your own market expectations.

How do you copy the best traders? The best copy traders signal providers typically have a large following, an established track record of performance i. Try to look at more than just the absolute returns when comparing the best traders to copy. Depending on your goals, it can also be important to find the right balance of diversification.

Pro tip: You should always consider the time horizon or, expected duration of your investment when copying another trader. Copy trading is like any investment, in the sense that you can either make money or lose money. Your profitability is determined by which traders you follow, as well as the timing of when you copy their trades — both of these factors will affect any resulting profits or losses.

You should assess the profitability of each trader before choosing which one to follow, and remember: just because a trader is making money at a particular time doesn't mean it's the best time to copy them.

As the market adage goes, "Past performance is not indicative of future results. Start with a small amount of capital, and do thorough research before committing to a strategy. The best trading system to copy isn't necessarily the most profitable. It is crucial to align your risk parameters with the strategy that best suits your investment goals. For example, a more conservative investor may choose a system with a lower average loss per trade, relative to the average profit. On the other hand, a more aggressive investor may choose a strategy that has higher volatility, which means a higher risk for losses — but also higher relative potential profits.

Many modern copy trading forex platforms contain hundreds or even thousands of signal providers. As a result, it can be difficult for traders to decide who to follow. Thus, it is always important to do research, start with a small amount, and never risk more than you are willing to lose.

While it may sound like a good idea to automate your trading strategy, copy trading still requires active account management — it's not a quick fix or an easy way to make money. Though it's not for everyone, copy trading can help you diversify your existing portfolio when used correctly, and the best copy-trade brokers will offer tools to help you manage your account.

Whether or not copy trading is a good idea for you will depend on your preferences, overall goals, risk tolerances, and what percentage of your portfolio you plan on allocating to copy trading.

Copy trading still requires you to work when setting it up because it's considered a self-directed account in most countries, compared to a set-it and forget-it investment fund or other passive investments where other people make investment decisions for you. Copy trading can be good for beginners, provided they learn the basics and approach copy trading the same way they would any other self-directed trading account.

That being said, copy trading is not a replacement for your trading needs — regardless of your experience level. Instead, copy trading should be thought of as a way to complement your portfolio and existing trading tool arsenal.

Check out our popular guide to forex trading for beginners. We'll help you pick a forex broker that's great for beginners, and give you an educational introduction to forex world.

Prudent beginners will analyze all available performance metrics when deciding whether or not to copy a particular trader.

Overall, copy trading can have its place for beginners — so long as they take full responsibility for managing their choices. Beginners who adopt copy trading can adopt good practices, such as keeping track of their account performance to make changes as needed, but copy trading is not a replacement for self-directed trading, and should not be thought of as a passive investment or managed account. The trade size in your account may be smaller or larger, depending on how you configured your account when initially subscribing to copy each investor.

Pro tip: Once you find one or more traders you wish to copy from within a copy trading platform, you will need to decide whether you want to only take on any new trades they establish, or immediately copy any of their pre-existing positions that may already be open.

There may be additional parameters that you can configure — such as the maximum amount of risk you are willing to take for each trader you copy — and other controls that may affect how you manage your account when copy trading these can vary depending on the copy trading platform you use.

Besides choosing a trader with good historical results, it's important to look at the performance statistics for each system, such as the amount of risk taken maximum drawdown and average trade size, duration, and frequency of trades. Some investors select more than one strategy, but having enough capital and choosing the right risk parameters if any is crucial when you copy trade forex strategies. Remember, copy trading is risky. Never invest more money than you are willing to lose.

Yes, copy trading really works, and you can verify the proof by checking the results of the best-performing traders. Likewise, there are traders that do lose money when copy trading. Copying a trader who has a successful track record or history of positive returns is no guarantee that you will succeed, although it can help increase the probability of making money compared to copying a trader that has poor historical performance. Pro tip: The tools available for analyzing traders and managing risk can vary widely across copy trading platforms, and database biases may come into play for example, recency bias, which can lead to simply following the trader currently performing best, which is not always the best choice.

In addition, investors may be led astray by strategy drift — which is when a trader deviates from the strategy that led to their historical performance, which can produce unexpected results.

The key to success is to do your research and keep up to date with your account performance, and intervene when necessary if copy trading doesn't work for you. Understanding how social copy trading networks calculate trading performance is an essential aspect of successful copy trading, as it affects the ordering of trader rankings.

Remember, copy trading is risky. Copy trading platforms allow users to automatically copy the trades of available signal providers in real-time using individually customized account settings and platform tools. By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies. He holds dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Oakland University, and has been an active trader and investor for close to ten years. It is crucial to align your risk parameters with the strategy that best suits your investment goals. These factors, together with the power of the crowd and advanced sentiment data, help to power social copy trading platforms, and the popularity of these platforms has soared as investors generate trading signals and enter the market with new positions that people want to copy.

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