eToro Trading Thread
Discussion
As the title says - a thread to discuss trading on eToro. It's been around for a while, but i'm pretty new to it. I always thought that copying a trader's trades is a bit like admitting failure and I am sceptical that a successful trader would bother doing such a thing. But instead of trading currencies/indices it's just trading people and trading does take screen time which those who have a profession can't commit. eToro have a dummy account option and I have selected a few traders to monitor and then evaluate whether I may want to chuck a few £ in that direction if I believe it to be worthwhile.
If some others do research and follow some other traders then in time we'll be able to compare performances / experiences and everyone can benefit from the additional information. Unlike most things in trading, this isn't a zero-sum thing.
From my brief looking around here are some things to look out for when considering copying a trader:
- Open positions - see if the Trader is sitting on losing open positions which have been running for a substantial time.
- Win rate - if you see a 100% win rate or something exceptionally high then you may want to check the open positions and what sort of profit they have been taking.
- Losses - Losses are good - it shows a trader is willing to save your account rather than try to maintain a 100% win rate figure. You just need to see the scale of losses and how they compare to the size of profits.
- Leverage - low leverage is better. It will depend on your risk profile but it's not optimal to take higher leverage and have someone lose you 50% of your account in a day. You can be on the other side of this of course and profit - it may make sense for small money initially but one wouldn't want to commit much to essentially a gamble.
- Frequency of trades - the larger the sample you work with, the more comfort you can take that they're not a one-hit wonder. There is a very real possibility that a trader may have done badly for their first 100 trades, then the market turned and what they now do seems to work. You just have to realise when it's no longer working and pause copying or get out to re-evaluate.
- Length of trade time - If you're looking for someone with low leverage, then it's no good if they trade once every 10 days. They might take sizeable profits but your ROI is going to be lower than someone churning the trades on a daily basis.
- Equity curve - A bit of a no-brainer but an upward equity curve is what you should be after. A gradual climb upwards with no extreme peaks or dips. Ensure they haven't been sitting on losing open positions and check their average trade length.
That's a few things off the top of my head. So I am on dummy account - I have been prudent and not committed any money to this yet (just putting this out there)
I have 'invested' in 3 traders so far: Maria421, ChrisLawlor, 4exPirate - Maria and the pirate are in the popular list I believe. I have allocated 10% of my account to each of them. I put a stop loss of about 50% on them, but in reality, depending on the trader I may allow a 30% drawdown before stopping and reconsidering. Maybe in time through people's experiences i'll see what's applicable.
Maria421 - 1 week followed +57% ROI - It's a good ROI, too high though. It's on the gambling territory and she's a serial trader. I currently have 17 open positions with her and i'm not sure what her strategy is - some trades she'll take for a few points, her position sizing is a bit random. She kept buying as the pair dropped. It turned around and I am in big profit today. If it kept going down? What's her plan? I'm not sure and that worries me. If following her, a stop loss is essential. The fact that she opens so many positions is scary and then if the market gaps you could end up losing more than your account easily. I did post some criticism on her page and she deleted in under a minute. Her wall is very edited, so be aware of all these sparkling reviews.
ChrisLawlor - I have followed him for about 3 days +1.7% currently - I have had about 3 trades from him so far. I like that he uses low leverage and he has 23% losing trades which is actually a good thing in my opinion. Time will tell if he's worth copying but I would feel safer having him look after a larger amount than Maria.
4exPirate - 1 week followed -1.4% - One trade taken, one loss. He seems to be followed by a lot of people and the loss is on the comfortable side. Need more data to see how he performs in time.
There's some overall strategy things I have been considering. Investing in a number of people to start with is just obvious. However, your sizing isn't. You may wish to start with uniform amounts and then reallocate money to the top performers. Alternatively, investing in a high leverage trader and then moving the gains to someone lower risk could be an option. I'll get to this in time but I realise this is a long post already.
Obviously any information in this thread is to be taken at one's own discretion and there is the possibility that losses can be incurred and in some cases greater than the initial investment so be careful/DYOR yada yada.
If some others do research and follow some other traders then in time we'll be able to compare performances / experiences and everyone can benefit from the additional information. Unlike most things in trading, this isn't a zero-sum thing.
From my brief looking around here are some things to look out for when considering copying a trader:
- Open positions - see if the Trader is sitting on losing open positions which have been running for a substantial time.
- Win rate - if you see a 100% win rate or something exceptionally high then you may want to check the open positions and what sort of profit they have been taking.
- Losses - Losses are good - it shows a trader is willing to save your account rather than try to maintain a 100% win rate figure. You just need to see the scale of losses and how they compare to the size of profits.
- Leverage - low leverage is better. It will depend on your risk profile but it's not optimal to take higher leverage and have someone lose you 50% of your account in a day. You can be on the other side of this of course and profit - it may make sense for small money initially but one wouldn't want to commit much to essentially a gamble.
- Frequency of trades - the larger the sample you work with, the more comfort you can take that they're not a one-hit wonder. There is a very real possibility that a trader may have done badly for their first 100 trades, then the market turned and what they now do seems to work. You just have to realise when it's no longer working and pause copying or get out to re-evaluate.
- Length of trade time - If you're looking for someone with low leverage, then it's no good if they trade once every 10 days. They might take sizeable profits but your ROI is going to be lower than someone churning the trades on a daily basis.
- Equity curve - A bit of a no-brainer but an upward equity curve is what you should be after. A gradual climb upwards with no extreme peaks or dips. Ensure they haven't been sitting on losing open positions and check their average trade length.
That's a few things off the top of my head. So I am on dummy account - I have been prudent and not committed any money to this yet (just putting this out there)
I have 'invested' in 3 traders so far: Maria421, ChrisLawlor, 4exPirate - Maria and the pirate are in the popular list I believe. I have allocated 10% of my account to each of them. I put a stop loss of about 50% on them, but in reality, depending on the trader I may allow a 30% drawdown before stopping and reconsidering. Maybe in time through people's experiences i'll see what's applicable.
Maria421 - 1 week followed +57% ROI - It's a good ROI, too high though. It's on the gambling territory and she's a serial trader. I currently have 17 open positions with her and i'm not sure what her strategy is - some trades she'll take for a few points, her position sizing is a bit random. She kept buying as the pair dropped. It turned around and I am in big profit today. If it kept going down? What's her plan? I'm not sure and that worries me. If following her, a stop loss is essential. The fact that she opens so many positions is scary and then if the market gaps you could end up losing more than your account easily. I did post some criticism on her page and she deleted in under a minute. Her wall is very edited, so be aware of all these sparkling reviews.
ChrisLawlor - I have followed him for about 3 days +1.7% currently - I have had about 3 trades from him so far. I like that he uses low leverage and he has 23% losing trades which is actually a good thing in my opinion. Time will tell if he's worth copying but I would feel safer having him look after a larger amount than Maria.
4exPirate - 1 week followed -1.4% - One trade taken, one loss. He seems to be followed by a lot of people and the loss is on the comfortable side. Need more data to see how he performs in time.
There's some overall strategy things I have been considering. Investing in a number of people to start with is just obvious. However, your sizing isn't. You may wish to start with uniform amounts and then reallocate money to the top performers. Alternatively, investing in a high leverage trader and then moving the gains to someone lower risk could be an option. I'll get to this in time but I realise this is a long post already.
Obviously any information in this thread is to be taken at one's own discretion and there is the possibility that losses can be incurred and in some cases greater than the initial investment so be careful/DYOR yada yada.
Edited by g4ry13 on Friday 3rd October 23:12
Pesty said:
.When you say stop loss 50% what do you mean?
When you get the option to copy a trader you can set a stop loss. Either via % or a monetary sum. It will essentially limit your losses to that amount. Let's say you have $100 allocated to a trader and you allocate a 50% stop loss. The most this trader will lose you is $50 and then they won't be able to take any more trades for you. It's just a way of limiting your exposure. I believe it works this way when you copy a trader but haven't put it to the test yet!
It may be worth checking out the help section for some other questions you may have. Such as how to unfollow/pause copying a trader.
Here's a section on the copy stop loss if you scroll down.
Edited by g4ry13 on Saturday 4th October 11:16
New to etoro too but been copying this person for a week for EURUSD trades
https://openbook.etoro.com/m/gstillr/overview/
https://openbook.etoro.com/m/gstillr/overview/
Hoofy said:
Just as well you don't trade real money.Stop losses do just that: stop a loss from continuing. I am guessing he set it to not lose more than 50% of the value of each trade so if it gaps he probably won't lose more than 100%.
just not a lot of it.The whole idea of this experiment was to try and learn a bit about markets. I will be doing the tutorials in time.
Stop loss sounds pretty self explanatory but just wondered if it was that obvious I'd misunderstood it
OtherBusiness said:
New to etoro too but been copying this person for a week for EURUSD trades
https://openbook.etoro.com/m/gstillr/overview/
I checked him out. I looked at open trades and saw he had one open from a month ago, but then saw it's hugely in profit. He has some losses (a good thing in my book) , small average trade size, doesn't seem to hold trades for too long, nice looking graph (although I wouldn't base a decision on a graph alone) , he's taken reasonable sized profits and from the losses I can see they're not massive. https://openbook.etoro.com/m/gstillr/overview/
So i'm actually rather impressed and going to follow him on my dummy account. I've followed him with $1,000, 50% stop loss. I'll evaluate stop loss sizes in time. I think i'll monitor my current people for the next week and then if there's something there i'll put a few £ in their direction.
What were your results / experience of him for the week?
Hoofy said:
I would follow someone for at least 100 trades to make sure they're not on a lucky streak.
100 trades is nothing. There's nothing special about an arbitrary figure. This Maria person has probably put me in about 50 trades over the last week. She'll hit 100 trades by the end of next week I should imagine and I may very well be no better off for knowing whether she's good or lucky. Whereas a position trader who may trade on a weekly or even monthly basis may make <30 trades in a year. So you have to follow them for over 3 years to get to 100 trades.
The main issue for me is finding anyone decent to follow. As I expect you know, lots leave losing positions open so they are not included in their stats, and therefore look better than they are. Also, must remember to tick the box to not open new positions on open trades for anyone that you start to follow.
OtherBusiness said:
The main issue for me is finding anyone decent to follow. As I expect you know, lots leave losing positions open so they are not included in their stats, and therefore look better than they are. Also, must remember to tick the box to not open new positions on open trades for anyone that you start to follow.
That is why it is important you check their open positions prior to following them. Right....I noticed something about one of the guys I was copying - ChrisLawlor, I was singing his praises about how he seemed to be good. I noticed he's just copying some other guy's trades, that is all he's doing. Nothing very impressive there. I'm not sure how his sizing compares but I may as well follow the other guy if I were so inclined.
I referred to Leverage in the original post, but there's a caveat. Small leverage is only half the story. There are some who put low leverage trades on, but then enter into a stupid number of trades so you actually end up with a rather large position. You may not see this from their records which is why I recommend following them on a dummy account before committing money so you can keep an eye on the sorts of things they get up to.
Last night Maria the nutcase gambler woman had a very decent profit on the trade but she was opting to run it. I personally would have taken the money off the table but for the purposes of this I can't interfere with it in order to assess how she would manage things. The market seems to have moved about 40 points back about wiping about 14% of my account value out. That's far too much for a long term trading thing. Looking at a picture of the woman does not inspire confidence (but I don't think analysing pictures is an objective measure for this experiment).
Maria - 18 open positions, she has opened and closed 2 today nicking a few points. I had a big profit on the trades but now it looks neutral. Account $1362 = 36% ROI - still impressive but she's a punter.
ChrisLawlor - 2 open trades, he's copying some guy. Both in sizeable losses. Lost 2.5% of account on the trade. Account now $991 so currently -0.9% ROI which isn't awful I suppose. Was previously about +1.7%
Gstillr - I think OtherBusiness recommended him. I had a lot of hope for this guy as he looked good. I can't work out what he's been doing - something with the stop losses. Either way, he has me in 2 trades atm. Both losing, Account is -4.3%. It's his first trade for me and I suppose being short Eur/Usd is never bad in theory. But we will see...
4exPirate - nothing very exciting. Not sure yet why people follow this guy. 1 small trade currently, 1 small loss. Account ROI: -0.3%
So bottom line: early days but Maria is a gambler, you can have a good run with her or lose 20%+ of an account in a day with her. I wouldn't put much into her. Early days with the others, but I wouldn't follow ChrisLawlor out of principle as he's just replicating the other person's trades. I will look into following some more people over the next few days before deciding if this has any legs.
Maria has lost even more money. She has a $300 minimum requirement to copy her. I wouldn't trust her with £10! Also she seems to clean up her wall really fast. I posted a critical comment and it was gone in under a minute. She's really sneaky about what is being displayed, it all looks like sparkling praise and gratitude but it's highly filtered.
On the dummy account I have now done the following.
- $1,000 to copy BestTraders (Ehsan Alborzi) - He's standing by some crappy looking convertible so he must be successful
He has a lot of followers (not that it means much) , a nice looking equity curve, has taken about 20% losses, smallish average trade size, trades on a regular basis and doesn't have any open positions from a long time ago. I have allocated a 50% copy stop loss to him.
- $1,000 to copy MaxxizLT (Regis Pierre Massicard) - He's wearing glasses and doesn't look totally gormless
- He has about 24% losses over the last year. A high frequency of trades. Small average trade size, although he does seem to hold on average for 6 days. Some of his losses from the last 3 months are a bit alarming, but I will trial him and see how it goes. Again a 50% stop loss.
- $1,000 to copy FCInvestment - i'm going to do something different here, he's actually a high leverage trader. Seems rather popular and some of my low leverage aren't exactly producing anything notable to look at as yet. He has about 20% losing trades, no open positions atm. 50% stop loss.
- $1,000 to copy Noa Strijbos - she's a bit of a longer term trader. Her history shows some decent sized profits on her positions. She doesn't trade so often and there's not a lot to base it on but the equity curve looks nice and as her win % is far greater than her loss and the losses aren't massive in size. Not quite about her position sizing but i'll find out on the dummy. 50% stop loss.
That leaves me with $2,000 to invest in some people. I'll see how the above and my current ones go and then look into if there's any success stories or any type of trader which especially has some degree of success.
- $1,000 to copy BestTraders (Ehsan Alborzi) - He's standing by some crappy looking convertible so he must be successful
He has a lot of followers (not that it means much) , a nice looking equity curve, has taken about 20% losses, smallish average trade size, trades on a regular basis and doesn't have any open positions from a long time ago. I have allocated a 50% copy stop loss to him. - $1,000 to copy MaxxizLT (Regis Pierre Massicard) - He's wearing glasses and doesn't look totally gormless
- He has about 24% losses over the last year. A high frequency of trades. Small average trade size, although he does seem to hold on average for 6 days. Some of his losses from the last 3 months are a bit alarming, but I will trial him and see how it goes. Again a 50% stop loss. - $1,000 to copy FCInvestment - i'm going to do something different here, he's actually a high leverage trader. Seems rather popular and some of my low leverage aren't exactly producing anything notable to look at as yet. He has about 20% losing trades, no open positions atm. 50% stop loss.
- $1,000 to copy Noa Strijbos - she's a bit of a longer term trader. Her history shows some decent sized profits on her positions. She doesn't trade so often and there's not a lot to base it on but the equity curve looks nice and as her win % is far greater than her loss and the losses aren't massive in size. Not quite about her position sizing but i'll find out on the dummy. 50% stop loss.
That leaves me with $2,000 to invest in some people. I'll see how the above and my current ones go and then look into if there's any success stories or any type of trader which especially has some degree of success.
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