Why do you need these trading tips?
The first steps you take on the eToro platform are quite important. So we’ve assembled our top trading and investing tips to help you familiarise yourself with all the different tools and features available to you. Here you can find solid principles for all the trading and social trading features on eToro.
Tips for trading on eToro
- Choose your assets: Are you into stocks? Currencies? Maybe Bitcoin? Each asset class has its own advantages and challenges, so be sure to familiarise yourself with each one.
- Be diverse: Any trader will tell you that the key to a low-risk portfolio is diversity. Spread your funds wisely across various assets and asset-classes.
- Stay informed: Stay up-to-date with recent news and upcoming financial events. You can use the eToro Calendar for this, and also get our daily market analysis via email.
- Pick a style: The way you trade can vary in relation to the amount of capital you have, your level of involvement, and other preferences. You can opt for the technical approach, which relies on reading charts and finding patterns, or the fundamental approach, which is more about trying to understand how an asset would react to a certain event or time of year.
- Practice: When you sign up for eToro, you get a demo account with $100,000 in virtual money. Use it to familiarise yourself with trading before risking your real money. You can use this account both for traditional trading and for copy trading.
Tips for social trading on eToro
- Find the right people to copy: Use the Discover People tool to find the best traders to follow and copy. Filter the results according to risk score, gain, country of origin, and many other categories.
- Copy top traders: The CopyTrader™ system is a great way to automate your trading habits. If you’re less of a “hands-on” trader, or simply don’t have enough free time, copying an experienced trader, automatically doing everything they do in real-time, is a great option.
- Learn about Popular Investors: Successful traders who gain a following can be accepted into eToro’s Popular Investor program. The program rewards these traders with amazing perks, which encourage them to share their knowledge and trade responsibly. If you’re a good trader, who shows good returns with low risk, you might be eligible for the program.
- Timing is everything: When copying a new trader, read their profile and familiarise yourself with their strategy. Some have long-term strategies that can include losses along the way, with the aim of profiting later down the line – so make sure you know what a trader’s intended cycle is.
Tips for investing in Smart Portfolios
- Introduce thematic investment into your portfolio: Thematic investment is a great way to invest long-term and reduce risk. Read more about it on the eToro blog.
- What are Smart Portfolios: A new financial instrument developed by eToro. Each Smart Portfolio investment strategy contains various assets or traders and is constantly optimised by an algorithm, programmed to reduce risk and increase profit.
- Know your Smart Portfolio: There are three types of Smart Portfolios:
- Top Trader Smart Portfolios, which group together successful eToro traders;
- Market Smart Portfolios, which aggregate various assets following a specific market strategy; and
- Partner Smart Portfolios, which are composed by some of the world’s most innovative financial service companies.
- Think long-term: Lower risks usually mean lower yields. Therefore, if you invest in Smart Portfolios, remember that they do not offer quick returns, and are designed to generate profit over time.
Tips for Investing
Goals: When you begin investing, you have to decide on a set of goals. Are you looking to make money quickly? Looking for long-term investments? Having a clear set of goals is like a compass. It will guide you as you confront various obstacles and options along the way.
Plan: If you have decided on a goal, you need a plan for getting there. What are the steps you will take to reach that goal or set of goals?
Investment assets: When you begin to construct a plan, familiarise yourself with all of the different types of assets in the investment universe. Each has their unique set of risks and rewards, and it is important to know how each one interacts with the other.
Investment strategies: There are a variety of investment strategies that you can employ to reach your goals. Some use technical analysis tools, others fundamental analysis. In the past century, there have been plenty of successful investors who have written about the strategies they used to build wealth.
There is risk: However you choose to invest, bear in mind that there is risk involved. You may earn a lot of money, but you could also lose a significant amount of money. It’s important to keep this in mind when you decide how much money to invest. Be sure only to invest an amount that you can afford to lose.
Educate yourself: Learn as much as you can about the investment world before investing your money. Today, there is a plethora of free materials on the web at your disposal. eToro has its own Academy with numerous educational videos, explanations, webinars, courses, lectures, interviews and more, all of which can help you approach the investing world with as much knowledge as possible.