Is eToro: An Investment or a Game?

eToro, an Israeli trading website, was the first to pioneer so-called social trading. We meet some of the industry’s most powerful influencers. These days, finance can be strange. R/wall street bets, a no-holds-barred subreddit frequented by retail investors and amateur stock-flippers who use the Robinhood trading app, was the epicenter of the planning for January 2021’s presidential election.

The stock price of the struggling video game shop was pushed rising to inconceivable highs during the event, largely for laughs and to take on established institutions.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and the founder of Tesla, has flirted with market manipulation with abandon on Twitter, tweeting not only about his firms but also about cryptocurrencies large and small (follower count: 59.3 million as of August 2021).

His bizarre writings on Dogecoin, a crypto-token designed as a joke and represented by a perplexed shiba inu puppy, have become particularly well-known. While it’s impossible to know the exact impact of Musk’s online Doge-related antics, the price of Dogecoin has risen from $0.005 in January 2021 to $0.31 in August.

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The internet, cryptocurrency, user-friendly trading platforms, and a pandemic-induced abundance of idle time have created a perfect storm that has reinvented retail trading as a game and transformed social-media savvy investors into quasi-influencers.

This isn’t, however, a new phenomenon: For more than a decade, Israeli trading platform eToro, which began in 2007, has been at the forefront of what the industry refers to as “social trading” features. Users on the platform can follow other traders, track their performance over time, and duplicate their strategies by automatically instructing eToro to apply the popular investor technique to their accounts.

eToro Benefits

eToro offers benefits and a monthly payment of up to 2.5 percent of the yearly average money invested by their copiers to the most copied famous investors. Who are the most popular eToro investors in the United Kingdom? Their backgrounds range from the traditional – finance or consulting experience – to the unusual.

You won’t win a prize if you predict what Britain’s most copied item is. Jay Edward Smith, who resides in the south of England, has over 30,000 people following his method and is optimistic about Bitcoin; he used to work as a professional gamer and eSports organizer before becoming a full-time eToro trader.

Smith explains, “That experience helps with trading.” “Games like chess, poker, and strategy PC games like Dota and StarCraft all feature this investment and trading overlap. “Risk management is at the heart of all of those games.” “I’ve previously organized large eSports competitions worldwide, traveled to them, and competed in them, so I’m extremely familiar with the online multicultural community on eToro.” Smith, a gamer at heart, uses Twitch, a video game live-streaming network, to communicate with his coworkers and followers.

He explains, “My Twitch account existed before Twitch existed – when [the platform] was still named Justin. tv. “born in South Africa, Heloise Greeff, who ranks third in the UK with 20,700 copiers, likes YouTube and considers herself more of a “financial educator” than an influencer.

Unlike Smith, she is not a full-time eToro popular investor, but she has succeeded in the online trading sector by leveraging her prior professional skills. Greeff believes that trading and building machine-learning algorithms are “quite complementary skills” as an Oxford AI researcher with a background in biomedical engineering.

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“Both my foundations and technical analyses rely significantly on machine learning,” she explains. She has a technology that can harvest “strings of words” from eToro, and Twitter feeds to predict market direction.

She’s also created her system for determining when to enter and quit financial positions. “I utilize vital-sign data in my day job to forecast when patients will worsen,” Greeff explains. “The same thing can be used to predict when markets will decline. “As the world’s health circumstances worsened — for example, during the Covid-19 pandemic – an increasing number of people began to appear on eToro. The platform received over three million new members in the first quarter of 2021, surpassing 20 million global users in June 2021.

According to Greeff, it’s feasible to claim that this move has democratized finance; millions of ordinary people are dabbling in trading thanks to unprecedented access to high-quality online data sources.

Markets, on the other hand, could implode in a nihilist irony. “I’m seeing it increasingly among the younger generations: they have a ‘don’t care’ attitude toward losing money and dangerous investments,” Smith says. “This meme culture and people laughing about their investments – I think it’ll be an odd future, but I’m looking forward to it.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t have some exposure to it,” Smith says, adding that he isn’t generally an investor in “meme stocks” or Dogecoin (which eToro made accessible for purchase in May 2021). But how does he know when a meme is no longer amusing? “Normally, when I’ve earned a decent profit,” Smith explains.