Does anyone have any experience with copy trading or any other form of what is called “social trading”?
I think it is a great way to lose money, remain uninformed and never succeed as a trader. Why would any successful trader let you follow or copy trades?
To put themselves in a shop window
To earn extra revenue through fees
To build a client base from scratch effortlessly & efficiently
To generate larger volumes & commissions via linked broker relationships
To use it as a stepping stone into more financially lucrative circles
I do see the conflict but surely there is some sort of “movement” of people that share knowledge and experience in this way. Just like here.
Thanks for the thread lexys, it covers most of what I’m trying to find out. But there’s another aspect - is social trading, more or less counting how many bulls and bears there are, used as a viable prediction method for the markets?
I wouldn’t think so, but don’t know for sure.
I wouldn’t, myself, want to put any credence at all in what the majority of traders at such sites are doing, at any given moment, as an indicator of anything other than what the majority of traders at such sites are doing, at any given moment. 
It would also perhaps be a very anomalous way to try to count/measure anything, given the way that some of the social trading sites effectively incentivise people to open multiple trades by “averaging down” and so on, not to mention the fact that many of them are trading either demo accounts or micro-accounts. Those aren’t (mostly) people trading for a living. I don’t myself see it being any more valuable as a directional predictor than looking at a major broker’s clients’ collective market sentiment on that basis (and that’s useless, I think).