Hi all I’m still new to Forex but I am currently learning a home study course which focuses more on long term trades. I recently found out something called copy trading which some brokers basically allow you to follow profitable traders and copy their trades. Basically wondering if anyone has done this and if there is a profitable side to copy trading or will it basically turn my account into ruins. I’ve seen that some sites do show a top list of traders with 100% wins etc, which I would say that they are more than likley going to lose you more money than make money. I work 40+ hours a week and was just looking to see if I could copy a few trades per week and help build my capital, while running a long term trade in the background.
If it was that easy we’d all be doing it.
Figures can be manipulated, when traders hit losing streak they can start afresh to hide this.
Long term, if you are serious about trading at all, better spending your time at the free school on here, read the threads, and either find or devise a system that suits your lifestyle and free time.
Good luck
You can do this through some brokers, and through “social trading networks”.
I wouldn’t dream of it, myself. You need to be hugely careful with it.
It seems to me that the two most important things to know are …
The figures presented are usually selective, concealing some important details. The techniques used by the traders who are incentivised to have “followers” typically revolve around whatever the criteria/monitoring-methods/ranking-systems in use at the sites where they attract followers, and are designed to “score well” according to those criteria, rather than to be safe and reliable.
The methods that determine the “top-ranking services to follow” are typically methods that will cause them inevitably to crash and burn, in the long run. There’s absolutely no reason to imagine that the traders/services who have been most successful over the [I]last[/I] 6 months will be successful over the [I]next[/I] 6 months, and many reasons strongly to suspect the exact opposite.
In other words, it’s very easy to be fooled: knowing what’s really safe to follow is a skill-set all of its own, and one that needs detailed understanding and familiarity. In my opinion, that’s all effort, time and energy that you could much more productively apply to your own trading education, rather than to trying to copy others.
Thanks for the replies, I have researched on some sites and they state exactly what you have said. The top traders are usually the ones that are more likely to use money as the figures are manipulated or the fact that the trader is unwilling to take any losses and will let trades go more negative until a turn around. I have got up to the elementary part of school of pipsology and it has helped me a great deal.