Zulutrade.com recently added Binary Options to their social trading platform. This means that you can now copy trades made by others without having to learn binary trading yourself (more on that below). A question frequently asked question asked is ‘how much can I earn?’. Before we go on to look at the question of earnings from copy-trading (social trading), lets have a look at what the traders themselves earn. But, before delving into that, lets take a look at how much you can lose!
This is important. It really is necessary to look at the bad before looking at the good, if you can’t take the heat… Zulutrade’s interface has a very good set of filters (very subtle design, very user friendly too). The image below shows a filter applied with the biggest trade losers (if you go onto their site you just click the arrow next to ‘profit’ in the ‘traders section’ to get the highest and the lowest earners).
The ‘top’ low earner’s account is at the time of writing $400K down! Look to the right and you will see that 1613 BinaryLife has managed to lose all of that over a mere 9 weeks of trading. Look down the list and you will see other big losses over short periods of time. These guys obviously have a lot of money to play with, and if you do sign up at the site you would need huge amounts of money to follow(copy) these guys, although obviously no-one in their right mind would want to do so! So how does this relate to copying traders? Read on.
If you are going to get involved in social trading you need to be able to use the tools at your disposal the first of which is the filters at the top of the Performance Table seen above. This is the first step (make sure you change the ‘mode’ slider at the top of the page from simple to advanced). Once you have selected a trader to potentially copy you then need to click on their icon for further details of their performance.
How you decide if a trader is suitable to copy depends on many things, the first being ‘risk appetite, and depends on how much you are able to lose (although if you sign up for a demo account you won’t be losing anything). But even with a demo account, you will want it to stay in profit, and the first indicator you should probably check is ‘Worst Position’. Even if you copy trades with real money setting them to smaller amounts it’s probably not a great idea to copy someone who obviously has a high risk appetite that can max your account out overnight.
Deciding which traders to copy is an art form in itself (the term ‘science’ cannot be used, because it is far from exact). Before deciding which traders to copy you need to do a bit of homework, as even the ‘best’ traders use strategies that can max the accounts of copiers with small accounts. In short, unless you have bank accounts the size of some of the players in the image above, you need to spend a bit of time getting to know both the trading interface, and the traders’ performance.
With the Forex platform at Zulutrade there is another function which is not available in the binary options section. You can find out who the best followers are (trade copiers), and copy their settings. This could potentially be a easier way of doing things, but again, their track records should be examined to see what their historical performance is, applying particular attention to their drawdown statistics.
The platform does offer both Forex, and Binary, so why choose Binary (or not). Binary Options is faster, but a criticism leveled at binary trading is that it is more of a gamble than Forex trading which is seen as a more ‘educated guess’ (it’s all a guess, as there are never any certainties within the markets). Whichever you choose, it may be wise to choose a demo account unless you have a pot of money which in the worst case scenario you can afford to lose, and have no worries about experimenting with a live account. For every who doesn’t have a spare pot of gold remember to trade responsibly, and never put more money into your account than you can afford to lose.
As a final point, the image above shows real losses made by real traders, but if that was the case for everyone, no-one would do it. So below is the good news. Check out the fifth one down, GG KORNEEV, started off with a lot less money that other traders, but look at the ROI!!
Sign up for demo account here, or a live account here.