A good investor always makes sure to keep an eye out for upcoming opportunities. For a social investor, that means looking not just for new market trends or fundamental events, but also for new emerging investors to copy.
Just like financial markets, or hedge funds, investors too have their ups and downs, and therefore it’s important to manage your copy trading portfolio to weed out investors that are declining and replace them with new rising talents.
With the launch of our new People Discovery tool, it is now easier than ever to find traders to fit within your investment strategy, however, within a network of over 3 million traders, it can still be challenging to find traders that are just right for you. So here are some tips on how to optimize your search results.
1. The more filters the better
When you first get to the Discovery tool, you are presented with a few basic parameters to start off your search. But why not use all the parameters at your disposal to limit your search? You can scroll down to the “More filters” buttons and set all your search parameters from risk, to portfolio composition, and even to how social you want your copied traders to be.
2. Do some ghost-busting
One of the filters you can use is the “Profile” filter, where you can choose to limit your search only to people who’ve uploaded their profile pic and provided their full names. I would recommend ticking both these boxes, which will eliminate all the eToro “ghosts” from your search results. Traders with incomplete profiles are much less likely to be socially active on the network or to consider their copiers’ concerns. And after all, would you really want to copy a ghost?
3. Understanding performance
Since you’re probably looking for traders who are profitable, one of the filters that you’ll probably want to use is the Performance filter. However, performance is a tricky thing to measure, which is why we’ve provided you with 3 ways of measuring performance: Gain, Profitable Weeks and Profitable Trades. Gain is the percentage of equity growth over the given period of time, Profitable Weeks is the percentage of weeks that the trader had finished in profit, and Profitable Trades is the percentage of the trader’s positions that were closed in profit. Use all three filters to achieve the most accurate performance-based search results, while paying special attention to Profitable Weeks, as it is most representative of the trader’s consistency.
4. Do your own thing
As you will notice when using the tool, most of the filters come with a certain number of broad presets. For example, when searching according to risk you can choose low leverage (5%), medium leverage (10%) or high leverage (20%). However, these ranges are there as a guideline and for each filter, rather than choosing from the given options, you can set your own range. When you do so, your search results will be better fitted to your own personal preferences.
5. Time frame is key
Pay special attention to the time frame you’re using for your search. A trader that shows great stats for the past month might not be as impressive when you look at his stats over the course of a year. The best strategy is to run the same search over a number of different time frames and see which traders make the grade for each time frame. If the same trader meets your search criteria for all time frames, he/she is more likely to suit your trading strategy.
That’s all for now folks! I hope these tips will help you discover new potential traders for you copy trading portfolio.
Do you have any more search tips for us? Share them in the comments below!