Account Setup

Demo account:

As with most of the top social trading networks, eToro offers a free full featured demo account, and getting started couldn’t be easier. Simply fill in the short form or authorise via your Facebook or Google+ account and you’re good to go.

Live account:

Again, creating a live account is quick and easy thanks to eToro’s integrated broker and once you’ve signed up, verification documents can be easily uploaded via the site. The approval process took no more than an hour or two and the minimum deposit is a mere $50.

eToro also has a bonus of up to $50 for your first deposit to help you get started.

Platform Features & Usability 

OpenBook, eToro’s social trading platform, is pretty seamless, easy to understand and the layout manages to be extensive without ever feeling cluttered. Whilst the web interface lacks mobile responsiveness, eToro does provide a very good mobile app, which is available to both iPhone and Android users.

Copying traders is simple and the filter options for finding traders is ample and easy to use. Whilst eToro doesn’t allow you to see a trader’s full trade history (only the last 100 trades), it doesn’t try to be a classic trading platform with extensive analysis tools and backtesting features and it does offer up to 3 years worth of performance (% gain) data which should be enough for the majority of investors on the eToro network.

Placing trades manually is also very easy and eToro offers quite a large selection of financial markets to trade, including Forex, commodities, shares and indices.

Fees 

As with most social trading networks that have their own integrated broker, you only pay the spread and nightly rollover on open trades.

Whilst spreads and rollovers are not quite as low as the competition, eToro somehow manages to make up for this with mostly no slippage on copied trades. Something that can be a real headache on many of the social trading networks that use 3rd party brokers.

eToro also charges between $5 and $25 for withdrawing funds.

Traders & Social Community 

eToro’s OpenBook community has over 2.7 million users and encourages social interaction, making it a great network for investors looking to learn and interact. On top of this eToro offers they’re Trading Academy, an unrivalled source of learning materials, including regular webinars, interactive courses, videos and much more.

The OpenBook platform allows investors to copy not only professional traders, but also the portfolios of fellow investors, meaning that there is over 2.7 million different users to copy or follow. Overall the top traders on eToro perform well, but in such a large pool of traders, finding the best ones can be difficult and the majority of the top ranked traders use longer term strategies which won’t suit everyone.

Risk Management 

Managing risk when copying traders is simply done by setting the amount you want to invest in that trader. There really isn’t much in terms of custom settings, but simply copying at a 1:1 level works well and we’ve never felt the need for any more settings as the simplicity fits in with the overall platform.

Support 

eToro’s support is ticket based and works very well, although we found the help section to contain pretty much every answer you could have. This section is a growing portal of common support questions with in depth answers and, in true eToro fashion, gets rated by users.

Funds Withdrawal

eToro supports a wide range of withdrawal methods including:

• Western Union/MoneyGram
• PayPal
• Credit/Debit Card
• Skrill (Moneybookers)/Webmoney/Neteller (eWallets)
• Bank Wire Transfer

Unlike many of the competing social trading networks, eToro charges a fee for withdrawing funds from your account which is as follows:

• $5.00    ($20.00 – $200.00)
• $10.00  ($200.01 – $500.00)
• $25.00  ($500.01 +)

This isn’t too much of an issue as most users won’t be making regular withdrawals and the process is very easy and completely integrated thank to eToro being their own broker.