As a company, eToro has been at the forefront of the social trading industry for some time now but we believe that the unveiling of its revamped offering in November 2015 neatly places it at the top of preferences when it comes to benefiting from social trading.
Building its new social trading platform from scratch has meant a lot of hard work by eToro and the stakes to offer a truly exceptional all-in-one experience across all devices were high, since the New eToro is to replace the two iconic platforms: OpenBook and WebTrader.
The new eToro platform aspires to become a real game changer, through revolutionising the financial industry and changing the way millions of people around the world manage their personal finances. Being the fastest platform ever released by eToro, thanks to push technology, the new eToro is extremely user friendly and requires just minutes from one to learn how to use it effectively, but at the same time it can provide professional level trading thanks to its increased sophistication.
Through the New eToro, which not only looks better and feels easier to use than any version before, but does in fact incorporate many innovative and useful features, eToro manage to put itself in a very strong position in the market, because the merging of their old trading (WebTrader) and social network (OpenBook) platforms into one gives substance to the proposition that they’re not just a broker and not just a trade copying service. Instead what the seek to achieve and what differentiates them from other social trading networks, is the creation of a unified environment where traders can easily interact, learn from each other, trade themselves and copy others.
Thus, is the new eToro the best venue to make money from social trading? We will venture to give a positive reply to this question, provided that one understands how the new features incorporated into the new platform work and learns to make full and effective use of them. The new features referred to here, include inter alia customisable watchlists, portfolio management tools, the ability to open trades from any screen, the most advanced set of risk management tools, advanced real-time charts, live newsfeed and many more.
In terms of usability, the merging of OpenBook and WebTrader into one, is a huge improvement since all your actual trading and your copy trading can be done from the same interface view, without the need for separate logins and even opening trades is possible from any view or screen.
Huge improvements were also achieved in terms of the mobile responsiveness of the platform which works perfectly on all mobile devices at exceptionally fast speeds, without compromising in any way the functionality or the look and feel of the desktop version.
The new eToro customisable watchlists feature allows all users to create a personal trading dashboard with the trading instrument and/or people they like to follow on eToro. As such they give an instant view of the performance of the instruments or people each used has selected selected, and allows them to actually trade instantly from this dashboard view.
Although watchlists are nowadays a commonplace feature offered by most trading platforms, what is particularly appealing about the New eToro watchlists is that they allow to quickly view the current sentiment (i.e. how many other eToro traders are currently buying or selling each instrument) directly under (box view) or next to (list view) the instruments. Moreover, through the new eToro watchlists, you cannot only watch financial instruments but also watch, and of course copy, other traders.
A further usability improvement is the full integration of a user’s portfolio view in the New eToro platform, which in a clear and simple manner shows the performance of one’s own trades as well they the people they follow and copy.
The addition of actual news releases relating to the instruments you select to watch, complementing the newsfeed on the trading activity and comments from other eToro traders, to one’s personalized news feed is also a notable improvement that needs to be highlighted.
The improvements made to the New eToro Discover People tool, which is the tool users use in order to look for and filter through the people they choose to copy in order to shift through the plethora of traders available for following and copying, make this crucial process both more functional and better displayed. Changing filter parameters is now much easier and works better on mobile devices as well, while all the search results are displayed in a much clearer manner and are easier to re-order according to the various parameters.
In terms of effective risk management, it is very useful that when a user opens a trade with the new eToro, the platform automatically displays some proposed take profit and stop loss levels (in actual $ value), which can be easily amended but are also very easy to understand. Other useful changes in this regard include the clear display of Overnight Fees (both daily and weekend) in the ‘Open Trade’ window, and also the fact that the values displayed take into account a user’s actual investment amount.
Besides actively encouraging its customers to manage and reduce risk, eToro has also proceeded with some changes that aim to lower risks by encouraging sustainable and responsible trading across their network and promoting consistent long term profits.
More specifically, to protect clients from inadvertently exposing their funds to the highest risk trading strategies, eToro has decided that profiles with the highest risk score will no longer be available for copying.
Responding to user requests, eToro has removed the allocation limit of 40%, which had been in place since the introduction of the Copy Stop-Loss feature, thus increasing the maximum copy allocation to 100% of one’s equity.
Moreover, eToro have introduced a revised profile questionnaire, the completion of which is a compulsory part of their verification procedure, that is instrumental in determining what kind of limitations – if any – a user might have on their Copy Trading activity.
Thanks to all these improvements and the constant forward looking of the eToro team that keeps finding ways to enhance the social trading experience of its users, we can propose here that if you want to reap the best benefits that copy trading has to offer, then you should not hesitate to open a free demo account with eToro to accustom yourself with its diversified offering and give a fresh breath and a boost to your journey in the fascinating world of online financial trading.
