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The best copy trading platform (by far) is eToro. There’s a huge number of expert investors to copy, and there’s a whole community of like-minded investors. It's also easy to use, and has a wide range of investment options. Plus, it’s low cost.
Ready to get starting copy trading? Good idea. It’s a great strategy for beginners to learn the ropes of investing, and even great for experienced investors too. You’ll be able to copy the experts, learn their trades and (hopefully) copy their profits – it’s easy to do too.
We’ll run through the in-and-outs of copy trading below, but first, here’s the best copy trading platforms (also called social trading platforms):
Check out eToro. It’s low cost, easy to use, and has a great range of investments.
eToro is one of the best investment platforms out there - and is by far the most popular, with over 30 million customers.
Why? eToro is very low cost (commission-free stocks), easy to use, and has lots of awesome trading features. There's also a community of other traders to learn from and even copy.
It’s also got the largest range of assets to trade and invest in – including stocks, ETFs, crypto, CFDs, currencies and commodities (such as gold).
Check out eToro. It’s low cost, easy to use, and has a great range of investments.
Copy trading is becoming very popular in recent years, and there’s now a few copy trading platforms out there. However, they’re not all that great – we’ve looked at a wide range of platforms out there to determine the best copy trading platforms.
Here’s the criteria we used:
We found this criteria narrows down the range quite a bit, and there’s only a few platforms we’re happy to recommend to our readers. The ones we recommend are all well established, trustworthy and offer a great copy trading experience.
If you’re not quite sure which one to use, overall, you really can’t beat eToro¹ – it was the original social trading platform, and is still king! It’s perfect for beginners all the way to experienced investors, and super popular across the world, with millions of traders using it daily.
If you’re just getting started, trading can feel very complicated (and it is!), but don’t let that put you off.
Finding the right trading platform can really pay off, especially if you pick a copy trading platform where you can simply copy what the pros are doing – you can benefit from expert insight and strategies, without the hefty costs, and you can learn the basics in no time.
Without sounding like a broken record, the easiest trading platform to use is eToro¹. It’s easy to use, and is the best copy trading platform by far. You’ll be able to copy thousands of professional traders, and join a community of other like minded traders – all learning together.
Let’s take things back a step, what actually is copy trading?
Copy trading is trading (buying and selling) investments such as stocks and shares, or foreign exchange (currencies), on a trading platform with lots of other traders and investors (more on this below).
You’ll be able to see what other traders are investing in, and simply copy their trades automatically (if you want to). Sounds pretty good right?
Copy trading is a great way to learn about investing and trading, and learn about the assets (investments) you are interested in too – sometimes there’s great conversations and analysis about certain investments (such as gold, or stocks like Tesla), which can really accelerate your learning.
With copy trading, you’ll be using the same platform as a regular trading platform, except it’s got the benefits of seeing what other people are trading too.
That means you’ll be able to trade the whole range of investments that typical trading platforms provide (often called asset classes). Let’s run through them.
Stocks and shares represent the ownership of a company, you own a ‘share’ of a company. Shares are traded on stock exchanges across the world, such as the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in the UK, and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the US (among others).
The total value of all the company shares combined equals the total value of the company. The share price can go up and down in value depending on the performance of the company, such as increasing sales, or the price can change depending on the market overall.
Exchange-traded funds (ETFs), are groups of investments (often stocks and shares), all packaged together into a single investment. This makes buying (and selling) the investments easy, and much cheaper as you don't have to buy all the shares individually (paying more in fees).
They can represent a whole range of things, such as a stock market index (indices), such as the FTSE 100 (top 100 companies in the UK), or S&P 500 (top 500 companies in the US).
Or, they could represent groups of companies within a particular industry, such as electric vehicles, green energy, or AI (artificial intelligence) companies – the possibilities are endless, making ETFs super popular with traders and long term investors.
Commodities are real, physical things, such as grain, oil, gold and silver. They are very popular to trade all across the world.
Forex trading is one of the most popular markets in the world. It’s simply swapping one currency for another, for instance Pounds (GBP) to US Dollars (USD). (Together called a currency pair, e.g. GBP/USD.)
Although it’s simple, it’s a fast moving market, and prices are constantly changing – it runs 24 hours per day, 5 days per week (meaning you can trade for longer hours than the stock markets), and prices react to breaking news across the world. It can be very exciting, and very lucrative for successful traders.
Crypto is another fast moving market, open 24/7, with hundreds of investments available on trading platforms.
Crypto can also be traded on copy trading platforms – although not as CFDs in the UK (we’ll cover CFDs below). You’ll buy and sell the crypto directly, which means eToro¹ is pretty much your only option (and luckily, it’s one of the best options for crypto too).
CFDs (Contract For Differences), are one of the most popular forms of trading across the world. They might sound complicated, but they work very similar to buying investments directly (in fact they’re even easier).
Rather than buying the asset directly (such as a share), you’ll enter into an agreement (a contract) with the CFD broker (trading platform), about the price of the asset in future (whether it will go up or down), and then settle the difference in price, when you decide to sell.
So, you’ll still make (or lose) the same amount of money as buying the stock directly, and sell whenever you like too. However, you won't actually own the investment. The name ‘Contract For Differences’ is used because you are entering into a contract about the difference in price, simple really.
CFDs are super popular because they provide traders a very low cost way of investing, particularly when making lots of smaller investments, such as day trading (regularly trading throughout the day, or week, with very short term trades).
Instead of paying a fee per transaction (such as £10 to buy a share), you’ll pay a fee within the price of the asset instead, which is a small markup added by the trading platform, called a spread fee.
CFDs also offer the ability to trade both price directions, so you can trade the price going up (going long), or trade the price going down (going short). You can’t do this when buying stocks directly. This offers traders a huge range of ways to make more money.
And, CFDs allow you to trade with leverage (borrowed money), which is also called margin trading. This is very popular. You are able to make a trade with more money than you actually have in your account.
Say, you have £50 in your account, and want to make a trade about a stock going up – you could trade with 5x leverage (5:1), and make the trade for £250 worth of stock instead.
If the price of the stock increases by 10%, you’d have made a profit of £25, rather than £5, if you had traded with only your £50. Pretty great right?
However, you also lose the same amount of money if the stock price were to go down 10%, so you’d lose £25, rather than £5. Ouch. That’s 50% of your account balance, not good.
Leverage is high risk, so please be careful. You can use leverage on all the trading platforms we recommend. The best platform for copy trading and leverage is eToro¹.
Here’s a run through of pros and cons of copy trading:
Copy trading is completely safe and legal to do.
It’s also perfectly safe to use a trading platform that offers copy trading, as long as you make sure they’re authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). They’re the people who make sure financial services companies are looking after you and your money. They’ll review companies to make sure everything is in order, and that your money is protected.
Note: all of the trading platforms we recommend are authorised by the FCA. You can also check companies yourself on the FCA register.
Your money is normally also protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). This is where if the trading platform were to go out of business (fail), you would get up to £85,000 of your money back. However, this typically only applies to your deposits, rather than trading profits.
And, most trading platforms will store customer funds (money) with a separate, large bank, and can only be returned to the customer. All of our recommended providers all do this.
There we have it for the best social trading platforms. More simple than you thought?
Copy trading offers a great opportunity to learn the ropes of trading by copying and learning the investment strategies of successful investors – and you can automate everything if you like too.
It can make a complicated topic (trading and investing) much more understandable, and you can follow the thought process of the experts, and why they are making certain investments.
You can also make your own investments alongside copying trading – the choice is yours.
We recommend eToro¹ as the best copy trading platform (also called social trading). It’s super popular, and loads of experts to copy. It’s also easy to use and low cost.
And that’s all there is to it. Good luck with your trading!
Check out eToro. It’s low cost, easy to use, and has a great range of investments.
Check out eToro. It’s low cost, easy to use, and has a great range of investments.
Edward Savage is a leading expert on money, with a background of 8 years working in financial services in London, has a business, accounting and finance degree, runs an investing community, and teaches people about money. He writes about all aspects of personal finance, including pensions, investing, mortgages and insurance.
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Check out eToro. It’s low cost, easy to use, and has a great range of investments.