Social trading technology is ... It allows people to take advantage of the things which
have come about with social networks...
So, with your Facebook, and your Instagram, and the idea of people connecting and crowd-sourcing
information, and evaluations.
It's taken advantage of that and used it for trading, which is kind of obvious.
Trading is something which is done by - it's done within a community - people buy and sell
- information is kind of king - everyone wants to know what's happening.
And social trading has become a way for people who weren't, maybe, financially trained, who
didn't go to business schools, and who didn't study investing to actually learn what trading's
about and be able to do it.
Obviously, in the past you had to go to, you know, you saw them on, you know, films from
the 80's and stuff - this big sort of pit full of people saying, you know "Buy!" and
"Sell!" and taking orders and buying pork bellies and orange juice and gold futures.
And now, you know, everything's done digitally - you can do it off your computer, from home,
and social trading is allowing people like me, who aren't financially trained to just
take advantage of the crowd's understanding.
There's also copy-trading which, you know, allows me to automatically copy the trades
of really very experienced and clever and good investors.
So, social trading tech is usually about websites, like the one I use - Etoro, but there are
many others - to... you log into these websites and it facilitates, like Facebook does - you
can browse through profiles...
Here look, I'll show you...
So, you can go to 'Copy People' here, and start to browse around and if you look at
it, it looks a lot like, you know, what you're used to - profiles really.
This is all social trading technology - it's using a social networking framework to facilitate
trading basically.
So I can click on one of these and I can look at their profile.
So the traders have different profiles - you can see statistics, how well they've done...
You can see their risk, you know - how risky this person is.
You can talk to them, you can see their feed - who's talking to who...
"Link on your facebook.." you know, people adding people on social media, you know...
Here's a little bit about the person.
And, you know, a little introduction - see what they're trading, see charts of their
progress - how well they're doing, how well they would have done over time.
So, it's using social networking but telling you specifically about traders... and so you
can find one - some of these guys are professional, and some of them aren't - some of them just
are naturally kind of talented individuals who are using platforms like this to really
become money managers - they're taking the place of the sort of historic money manager
guy with the red braces and the big phone in the 80's and if you're naturally good at
this - at the maths, at understanding the markets, at trading - at buying and selling,
you can become a money manager on one of these social trading platforms.
On Etoro it's called a 'Popular Investor' and people put their money with them and say
"Right, you know what you're doing, you trade for me."
And, you know - for free ... So that's amazing.
So that's basically what social trading tech is - I think it's about the frameworks that
people are using - the websites which are allowing people to become part of social trading
and copy trading and sort of take control of their money and, you know ... In a familiar
environment.
People are familiar with social networking - with Facebook ... So they know how it works.
If you look around here, you'll see that all the buttons - I mean we know what these buttons
will do - buttons are on the left, you can invite friends, you know, you can blah blah
blah blah blah.
I'm going to go back - "withdraw Funds", there's guides, help, you can trade the markets - you
can have a look at the markets...
You see what I mean, you can check on different stocks, different stock exchanges - the beauty
of social trading is, I believe - for me it's in copytrading.
It's in the idea that I can go to these people and search through who's good, and literally
set my account to automatically copy their trades.
That's unbelievable - that's never happened really before in humanity...
It's only because we have these amazing websites now, and very fast internet connections and
everyone's connected all over the world that you can get this sort of information from
a crowd...
That's it.