Best Copy and Social Trading Platforms of 2023

Right off the bat, social and copy trading are not the get-rich-quick schemes most newbies desperately hope for. Riding on the success of seasoned and more successful traders is certainly a viable option, but you still need to consider several things before diving into the deep. So, let us begin our analysis by first drawing a distinction between copy trading and social trading.

In copy trading, you look for a well-performing strategy of an experienced trader to subscribe to. You make money as the trader makes money, but the risks they take on now become your risks too. Social trading also allows you to profit from others, as well as learn from them by getting practical insights, so you can eventually develop your own edge and a consistently performing trading strategy.

Choosing the right broker might be a daunting task for a number of reasons. You have to ensure that the entity you select has all the proper regulations, a user-friendly platform, offers competitive pricing, and so on. That is where we come in. Our aim is to help you make well-researched and thought-out decisions when choosing a reliable partner on the market, using our expertise and a vast collection of broker reviews.

Our picks for best brokers in each category are based on a thorough examination of a wide spectrum of features and tools offered by each broker. We have broken down our picks by category in order to highlight the aspects in which each broker excels so that traders with different needs may choose the best option for them.

List of Top Platforms for Social and Copy Trading

Best brokers for US traders

• eToro – Best Overall in the US
  The best copy trading conditions in the US. Affords commission-free trading on stocks. Unique and helpful ESG rating tool for informed investment decisions.

Best brokers for international traders

• FP Markets – Best Overall
  Best combination of social and copy trading solutions. Over 10,000 tradable instruments. ECN and DMA pricing models. Complimentary VPS.
• SquaredFinancial – Best MT5
  Multiple trading instruments from different asset classes. Choice of platforms with easy learning curves. Very low trading commissions. Competitive spreads.
• IC Markets – Best Low Spreads
  Spreads and commissions below the industry average. Free deposits and withdrawals. Diverse account types. cTrader and MetaTrader4/5.
• OctaFX – Best Social Trading Broker
  Easy-to-implement copy trading solutions. Comprehensive accounts monitoring tool. Offers swap-free trading. Decent range of research and educational materials.
• Vantage – Best Copy Trading Broker
  Very attractive conditions in ‘Vantage social trading’. ZuluTrade, MyFXBook Autotrade, and DupliTrade available. Offers standard STP, Raw, and Pro ECN accounts. Great customer support.
• FXCM – Best for Professional Traders
  NinjaTrader and other professional platforms. Enhanced versatility for managing risk. High execution transparency.

How Did FX Empire Select the Best Social and Copy Trading Platforms?

• Trusting others with your hard-earned money requires high transparency and accountability. That is why we consider only the most tightly regulated and trusted brokers that comply with the strictest safety policies in the industry.
• We evaluate the most user-friendly proprietary platforms that accommodate social and copy trading. We also checked whether the brokers incorporate other leading third-party tools, such as ZuluTrade, DupliTrade, and MyFXBook.
• The ultimate success of even the most sophisticated trading strategies depends on several contributing factors. That is why we test the liquidity supply and speed of order execution afforded by a broker. We also evaluate the range of its tradable instruments and the usability of its account types.
• We also measure every broker’s spreads, swaps, and commissions and determine the type of traders they are most suitable for.
• Using our extensive database, we can point out the most suitable brokers for newbies and professionals based on their skill levels, preferences, and needs regarding copy and social trading.

Our team of experts has identified each broker’s strengths and weaknesses using FX Empire’s comprehensive methodology. You can read more about it and how we conduct our tests here.

Now let’s take a dive into the selected brokers.

Our Methodology

FX Empire has pioneered a unique and comprehensive methodology for evaluating the services and conditions of brokers that provide leveraged trading to clients worldwide. Our goal with each review is to underscore even the most minute pros and cons in the service of each broker so that our readers can gain a clear and comprehensive understanding of what the company can do for them.

After completing hundreds of reviews over a decade, we remain just as committed to continue updating and improving our methodology in light of the ever-changing market environment. We test the functioning of each broker by systematically employing over 250 variables across nine different categories:

• Trust
• Fees
• Account Types
• Tradable Instruments
• Platforms and Tools
• Deposits and Withdrawals
• Customer Support
• Research
• Education

We review the licenses of each subsidiary operating under a brand name and check the fine print in the Client Agreements in order to discern the exact protections entailed to clients of the broker. We put a lot of effort into evaluating a broker’s transparency and trustworthiness based on the scope and availability of information on its website.

Other essential information is gathered by opening a live account with the entity under review and testing its services in real-time. We measure the spread rates, swaps, and commissions on its most popular account type and compare our findings to the industry average.

We test the functionality of the platforms, the number and types of available instruments, the reliability of customer support, and the quality of the research and educational materials. Moreover, we check the reliability and security of secondary services, such as automated and social trading, so that we can determine how safe they are for the average retail trader.

We abide by our strict guidelines for editorial integrity based on the objective standards we have set for our reviews. You can read more about our review process here.

Meet Our Writers

The team of forex and CFD analysts and editors at FXEmpire is composed of trading industry professionals and seasoned financial journalists. Our experts have been published on leading financial websites such as Investopedia and Forbes. In addition, they all have extensive trading experience.

How to Choose Social and Copy Trading Platforms?

This section highlights all the relevant considerations you have to make before using copy or social trading platforms.

What are the Most Important Safety Considerations for Social and Copy Trading?

Licenses, licenses, licenses! If there is one thing separating all the trustworthy brokers from the ones of less reputable disposition, it’s their authorizations and licenses issued by trusted regulatory bodies. You can usually find all relevant information about a broker’s licenses and regulations in its Client Agreement, which should be displayed in the Legal Docs section of the website.

You should always look for all the significant hallmarks of a reliable broker in its Client Agreement – segregated funds, negative balance protection, a compensation scheme, and if it caps the maximum leverage allowed.

But what about copy trading and social trading in particular? Well, the most important thing to remember is that you must make sure you know who you trust to trade on your behalf, whether directly or indirectly. If you subscribe to somebody else’s strategy and copy their trades, it is not enough to only check their success ratio of winning trades against losing ones.

Make sure you know the person you are dealing with. Talk to them, inquire about their approach to trading, find out what is their usual market exposure per trade, and so on. Subscribing to a winning strategy is one thing, but you have to ensure that the goals of the person running it match the needs and means of your account. In short, do your due diligence and look for the strategy that best fits your circumstances instead of the one promising the biggest returns; especially if the underlying risk exceeds the risk you can tolerate.

Read more about Best regulated forex brokers.

How to Estimate the Competitiveness of a Broker’s Fees?

High trading costs can curb the success of even the best-performing strategies. That is why before you start looking for the highest-earning traders to subscribe to, you have to evaluate whether your broker’s fees are competitive when measured against the industry average.

Things like spread rates, swap rates, and commissions are important determinants of success in the long run. For instance, a strategy with fewer successful trades could generate higher net returns than a strategy with a higher ratio of successful trades, which is nevertheless executed with a broker with higher trading fees.

That is why your first concern should be to consider what strategies are best suited for your account type. For instance, if you have a standard STP (Straight-Through-Processing) account with no commissions and floating spreads (usually starting from 1.0 pips), your account is tailored for high-frequency trading. Commission-free accounts accommodate high-volatility strategies, like intraday trading and scalping, which require frequent getting in and out of trades intended to capture small price changes.

Accordingly, if you have an ECN account with a fixed round turn commission per traded lot and raw spreads (usually from 0.0 pips), your account is better suited to accommodate high-volume trading strategies. Day trading and position trading strategies are prime examples of this type. Those entail the execution of comparatively larger positions less frequently. The central idea is to avoid paying a lot of commissions, take advantage of the much smaller spreads, and ride much larger price trends.

Why is Liquidity the Main Determinant of Long-Term Success?

Now that you’ve thought about regulations and fees, it’s time to turn your attention to precision and speed of execution. Like with a broker’s trading fees, its liquidity supply (or lack thereof) can affect your overall performance.

To understand why this is important, consider the following example. You’ve discovered the highest-earning strategy on your broker’s social trading platform and have happily subscribed to it. And the trader running it spots an excellent opportunity at 10:00:01. He reacts and places a market order at 10:00:04. Suppose also that the broker’s access to liquidity from its providers is poor so that the order gets filled at 10:00:06. Once filled, an identical order is placed automatically on your end. It takes another second or two to finalize.

In these critical 6 or 7 seconds in this imaginary scenario, the price of the underlying could have already changed significantly to the point where the opportunity is no longer viable. And yet, you are locked into a position that was opened without a competitive edge. In the long run, such poor execution can only lead to one certain outcome, and it does not involve you accumulating a lot of profits.

And even if there is no delay between the time the original position is opened and an identical trade is placed on your account, the precious few seconds wasted before the order is filled could still be too much. When this difference is to the disadvantage of the trader, it is called negative slippage and is caused by poor liquidity supply.

To mitigate the risk of negative slippage, make sure you choose a broker that:

• Has access to a deep liquidity pool supported by multiple providers.
• Has an average execution time of fewer than 1.0 seconds.
• Has a best execution policy on its website.

How to Choose Brokers With Access to Multiple Markets?

At the end of the day, if the strategy you’ve subscribed to is generating you enough profits, you are unlikely to ponder over the minor details of how exactly this is achieved. But it’s nevertheless worthwhile considering the type and number of instruments afforded by your broker to ensure you have sufficient versatility on the market.

Let us consider another example with this hypothetical trader of ours who has somehow developed the most effective trading strategy and yet always seems to end up working with brokers of questionable quality. Suppose you have again subscribed to his strategy, but this time the broker the two of you share provides only a limited number of instruments from a few asset classes.

This means that this trader would be limited in the ways in which he can exploit currently unfolding market opportunities. For instance, a new tech stocks rally could be starting, but the broker does not support any CFD shares. Or it could be that the broker offers a fairly broad range of FX pairs and not much else, but recent tribulations in the Forex market have made the underlying conditions unsuitable for the trader’s strategy.

In both cases, the limited access to a wide and diverse selection of markets will negatively impact the trader’s performance, thus affecting your bottom line as well.

That is why it is important to look for a broker that affords access to multiple instruments from a wide range of markets. Moreover, the availability of more complex instruments like vanilla options in addition to the industry standard CFDs means that you, or the trader you have subscribed to, can exploit the same trading opportunities from different angles.

What to Avoid When Choosing a Social or Copy Trading Platform?

If your plan is simply to duplicate the success of others, then even the most basic platform like MetaTrader 4 (MT4) can do the job, provided you find a signal provider whose system matches your needs. But if you want to grow as a trader and hone your skills over time, then perhaps you need a more sophisticated platform.

Avoid platforms that are not user-friendly or do not accommodate easy interaction between its members. You want to be able to communicate freely with more experienced traders so that you can gain different perspectives on trading.

Also, avoid platforms that do not have sufficient indicators and drawing tools, do not have a best execution policy, or do not incorporate a wide range of instruments from multiple asset classes.

How to Avoid Forex and CFD Scams?

Scam brokers rely, above all else, on the gullibility of traders. A common tactic scammers employ to lure in new victims is to promise quick and easy profits at no risk to the trader. But even more noteworthy, they promise to be trading on behalf of their “clients,” requiring almost no effort from them.

Unfortunately, the allure of easy profits without any real effort is quite similar to the idea of copy trading, where you subscribe to another trader’s strategy and hope to replicate their results. But there is one substantial difference, however. Real copy trading involves a symbiotic relationship between a broker, a signal provider, and a signal follower, which benefits all parties. And copy trading still requires due diligence.

So, the question is how to recognize and protect yourself from scammers wanting to exploit your trust and steal your money. Well, first and foremost, look for licenses and regulations! The best way to protect yourself is to make sure you work with a trustworthy and transparent broker. You can find a comprehensive list of reliable brokers in different jurisdictions here.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to be careful where you leave your information online. Registering your details on suspicious pop-ups or even more innocuous-looking landing pages promising you enormous profits could result in your contact details ending up in a scammer’s calling list. Remember, no licensed broker would make unsolicited, cold calls.

The next time you get called out of the blue with promises of becoming the next Warren Buffet with zero effort, you are most likely speaking to a scammer. Nowhere is the “if something sounds too good to be true…” saying more accurate than in the world of trading. That is why if you want to be safe, always check the licenses and authorizations of the brokers you plan to do business with.

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