Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
The Israeli forex broker and social trading platform developer eToro announced a major update tightening the requirements for its Popular Investor social trading program. Their main goal is to further reduce investor risk and bring benefit both to the popular investors and to those who copy their strategies.
The majority of changes apply to the copied traders in the Popular Investor and include the minimum deposit requirements, minimum average monthly equity, the minimum copiers or assets under management (AUM), maximum AUM and maximum risk score. In eToro’s definition, AUM is the sum the copiers have allocated for social trading, including loss and profit of any open transactions, as calculated every day in the broker’s systems.
According to the new conditions, each verified social trader can be copied, as long as s/he maintains a maximum risk score of 7 or below, while the participants in the Popular Investor program must maintain a risk score of 6 or less. The popular investors who wish to rise through the program levels, must also meet the other requirements listed in the table above.
On another hand, the regular traders will no longer be able to copy social traders who have not made a first deposit or do not meet the minimum risk requirement. Popular Investors who haven’t met the deposit requirement or maintained the minimum level of equity or who exceed the maximum risk score cannot be copied either.
eToro has also set the rule that each participant in the Popular Investor program must gain at least two months of experience on each level, before progressing to the next one.
The broker reserves the right to close the copied trades under exceptional circumstances, such as highly risky or abusive trading on part of the copied trader or s/he is inactive or cannot be contacted.
eToro launched the Popular Investor program in November 2013 to replace the Social Trading Guru program. Since then it has been through several updates. Currently it has four levels: Cadet, Rising Star, Champion and Elite. Each level has it’s own benefits, including a spread rebate from the previous month’s spread costs, fixed monthly payments and revenue share as an eToro partner for any new members the trader brings to eToro.
eToro was launched in 2008 and offers a social platform for investors to communicate, share strategies and trade in forex, CFDs, commodities, indices, stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It has more than 4.5 million registered users from 170 countries across the world and is regulated by UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC).
Recently eToro and the largest Russian bank, Sberbank, announced a joint venture, which would provide access of the bank’s clients to the broker’s social trading platform.
