Social Trading

In this series of posts I’m going to be looking into the recent phenomenon of Social Trading and Copy Trading. I wan to see if I can generate a decent enough return from a minimum investment and check if this could classify as another potential online revenue stream that I can tap into during my travels.

The concept of Social Trading and Copy Trading is that you are using the wisdom of others to make your investment decisions. There are a number of social trading platforms that give you full access to invest in markets, indices, stocks, commodities and the like.

These platforms also give you statistics on other traders who are on the platform so you have full visibility of the trades that they make. Not only this, but if you find a trader whose style and returns you particularly like, then you can choose to copy this trader, something known as ‘Copy Trading’. This will allow you to automatically copy all of the trades that they make, but scaled to the amount of money you have invested. So if a trader invests 10% of his portfolio in a certain trade, then you will also invest 10% of your portfolio in the same trade.

The idea behind this is that you are investing in people and their investment strategies, rather than in individual markets or trades themselves. The power of social trading is that it makes trading a lot more accessible to the average Joe, like me!

At the moment, I know very little about Social Trading and whether this is worthwhile or not, so this series of blog posts over the next few months will give you full details of my experience and my honest opinion of whether this is worth pursuing further or not.

Through this series, we’ll have a look at the basics of social trading and then try and analyse some of the different social trading platforms. I intend to start off by investing in the most popular social trading platform ‘eToro’, and if that goes well I will try and branch out into other platforms as well.

My experience and understanding of trading is limited only to a basic understanding of stocks and shares and investment funds, so whatever happens, I’m guaranteed to learn a lot a long the way!

So I’ve got loads of ideas going around in my head of things that I want to try out, but having a full time job, means I’m time poor at the moment so I need one key thing…. Focus!

I’ve already started looking at a few ways of making a location-free living, so here’s a quick summary of the top 3 ideas standing out at the moment:

If you haven’t heard of it, this is a relatively new phenomenon that has developed over the last few years, which allows you to copy the trades that traders themselves are performing on the stock market, currencies, indices and commodities.

The idea is quite simple…You don’t need to understand a lot about any of these things, because it’s the traders that you’re investing in.

You can see detailed stats of each trader’s performance, which helps you to filter and choose who you invest in. When you ‘copy’ a trader the programme will automatically mirror the trades that the trader has done, but only proportionally to the money you invest.

There are a number of Social Trading platforms out there, but the one I’m starting with is Etoro, which has a very straightforward usable interface, and is ideal for beginners.

Blogging

I love writing, I’ve worked with websites for many years and I believe that there’s definitely a good lifestyle to be had by running a successful blog or website.

I’m going to take you through all of the basic steps to setting up a website, and then gradually molding it into a hopefully profitable venture, that will help me towards the lifestyle I’m looking for.

Matched Betting

My Dad always says, “There’s nothing free in life son!” and most of the time he is right and there’s usually a catch.

However, on the face of it, this idea looks like it is a risk free way of earning a few pounds with minimal input.

Again, it’s a simple idea, where you take advantage of the plethora of free bets that the different Online Betting Shops are advertising. You place one free bet on the outcome of the event happening, and another bet (in a different account) backing that this event will not happen. If the odds are very close to each other then you will win one bet, and lose the other one, but the difference between the two bets will only be very small BUT you get to keep the value of the original free bet.

So I’m going to focus on these 3 ideas to start with over the next couple of months, and see if we can start filling up that Dream Fund!