eToro CopyTrader Trials – Final Results – Who Ranked 1st?
It’s been 1 whole year since we started the eToro CopyTrader Trials.
If you’re unfamiliar with eToro, their social trading and CopyTrader feature is a clever idea. You can see a profile of traders from around the world, see their performance and then copy the trades of a trader or as many different ones as you like. We did a quick review of the site here.
Following on from our 12 month results we decided to try and find the best strategy to pick a selection of traders and just sit back and let them do the work. The main questions being, does copying the highlighted traders work? And if so which groups of traders should you copy?
When you login to eToro there are already some clear sections to help you decide. We decided to test the main ideas as well as coming up with a couple of our own.
The categories for our trials were:
- Editor’s Choice.
- Most Copied Top 10 (Removed Filters).
- Most Copied Top 10 (eToro Original Filters: Risk (1-6) Daily DD<25% Return: 0-95% PI Copiers < 20,000).
- Trending Top 10 (eToro Original Filters: Including copiers 10 to 2500, copied trades <0, instrument Tesla).
- Elite Pro Black Star.
- 2020 Best Performers Top 10 (Risk max 6).
A few points:
- Copytrades were done in our virtual portfolio.
- Each copy was to the value of $500.
- All candidates were copied on 31st December 2020.
- Some traders are in multiple categories.
- Some traders could not be copied due to their eToro limits. Because we are trying to imitate a real scenario, if we are doing a top 10 we then copied number 11 to make our top 10.
Virtual Portfolio Anomalies
After 1 year of running this a few glitches appeared in the virtual equity calculations. The top performer was bensonkuo with a huge 1,040.28% profit which made no sense, he’s only up 5.9% for 2021 when we look into his statistics. openwings was up 680%, but in reality he’s up 12.58% for 2021.
When I looked into the trades that had been made, this also made no sense as a huge proportion of the profit had been made off 1 small trade on a stock that only doubled throughout 2021 and the trade was also unleveraged.
So I reached out to some eToro facebook groups including the ‘eToro Investor’s Community’ and ‘eToro Community Group’ and many people agree. Some positions in virtual accounts are 10,000% in profit, the virtual account is no good when copy trading and one member even said, “I tested both by simultaneously opening the same trades and surprise surprise the virtual made a great deal more profits!”.
So with this in mind, the only way to make a fair comparison is to scrap the virtual account figures and take the 2021 performance figures off of each traders statistics. If we assume we are copying all trades then this seems fair.
eToro CopyTrader Trials – 1 Year Results.
We’ll briefly summarise the results here for each category. For fairness we have taken the average as some groups like the Elite Pro Black Star only have 5 members. In our video we run through each category in a little more detail. At the end of this post and in the video we reveal the top traders throughout the research.
1 Year Results: Editor’s Choice.
The Editor’s choice category returned an average of 9.64%. Out of the 8 traders 7 made a profit and 1 made a loss of 10.6%. The top trader was rubymza with 17.65% profit in 2021.
1 Year Results: Most Copied Top 10 (Removed Filters).
This category returned an average of 5.94%. Out of the 10 traders 7 made a profit and 3 made a loss of up to 7.17%. The top trader was jaynemesis with 21.32% profit in 2021.
1 Year Results: Most Copied Top 10 (eToro Filters).
This category returned an average of 9.12%. Out of the 10 traders only 6 made a profit and 4 made a loss of up to 8.74%. The top trader was misterg23 with 51.24% profit in 2021.
1 Year Results: Trending Top 10.
This category returned an average of 11.75%. All 10 traders made a profit. The top trader was Chongzheng with 24.42% profit in 2021. eToro applied quite a few filters in this category. I really expected this to not feature quite as well as often trends phase out.
1 Year Results: Elite Pro Black Star.
This category returned an average of 8.86%. 4 of the 5 traders made a profit. 1 made a loss of 6.37%. The top trader was jaynemesis with 21.32% profit in 2021.
1 Year Results: 2020 Best Performers.
This was a real gamble of a category that you won’t see on the eToro discover page. It included some traders who in 2020 just made 1 trade which grew by thousands of %. In this category 4 profiles can no longer be viewed so the data can’t be retrieved. Another 4 traders made no trades and had 0% profit. This leaves only 2 traders who both had a profit. The top trader was GungasTrade with 11.32% profit in 2021. The average for this group was therefore really unknown, but if we conclude the deleted profiles were also zero (which they may well have been worse) then the average return for this group was 1.61%
eToro CopyTrader Trials: Best Individual Performers.
Past performance is not an indication of future results.
The stand out winner here is misterg23 (George Thomson) with profit of 51.24%, which is quite an incredible achievement. George now also has a black star by his name. You can find out more about his trades on his profile and also his youtube channel called Trader George.
eToro CopyTrader Trials – 1 Year Results Summary.
Here is a summary of the results for the first 12 months.
As we can see the top group was the trending group. Please note, the filters for this do change regularly. The editor’s group put in a strong performance. It’s a real surprise to see the Elite Pro group only returning 8.86%. It also shows it doesn’t pay to follow the crowd with the most copied traders coming in 5th place.
Another way to look at these performances though is to compare them to index funds. The graph below does this.
As we can see the S&P 500 returned a far higher rate of 28.7% including dividends. The FTSE 100 returned approximately 17.7%. This is a bit of a shock really when comparing with our groups. All of them significantly underperformed these indices.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed our 1 year summary, it’s taken quite a bit of work to complete. If we receive enough interest we will do more of these research projects.
eToro is a multi-asset platform which offers both investing in stocks and cryptoassets, as well as trading CFDs.
Please note that CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 68% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.
Past performance is not an indication of future results. Trading history presented is less than 5 complete years and may not suffice as basis for investment decision.
Copy trading is a portfolio management service, provided by eToro (Europe) Ltd., which is authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cryptoasset investing is unregulated in some EU countries and the UK. No consumer protection. Your capital is at risk.
eToro USA LLC does not offer CFDs and makes no representation and assumes no liability as to the accuracy or completeness of the content of this publication, which has been prepared by our partner utilizing publicly available non-entity specific information about eToro.
If you would like to join eToro or just find out more, please click on our affiliate partner link below.
✔️ Trade Commission Free Stocks at eToro (Your capital is at risk. Other fees may apply).
✔️ Earn up to $20 worth of crypto whilst learning at Coinbase.
✔️ Invest commission-free with Freetrade. Get started with a free share worth £3-£200.
