Trade mirroring, or copy trading, has seen a huge explosion in interest among traders in recent times. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s basically the process of seeing other people’s trades in real time, with the option to copy them automatically. There are several reasons why this approach might be an attractive option. Firstly, it allows inexperienced or otherwise unsuccessful traders to earn money by copying the trades of the most successful traders. Secondly, it gives you an insight into how those traders operate, so that you can note their strategies and compare them with your own. Thirdly, if you are a successful trader in your own right, you can earn money in the form of subscription fees from those that are following your trades.
For many years, Metaquotes’ MetaTrader software has been the de facto standard for independent traders looking to leverage automated trading techniques and signal generation. So, it came as no surprise when Metaquotes launched a new trade mirroring service for Metatrader 4 and Metatrader 5 last year, entitled Trading Signals. The huge flexibility of this software, coupled with the vast community of traders and programmers writing open-source scripts for it, makes it a natural choice for the implementation of trade mirroring. It’s a platform that most traders are familiar with already, and the scope for customizing exactly how you want the software to operate is huge.
Of course, there are potential pitfalls to trade mirroring, as there always are with any kind of market speculation. You could choose to follow an inexperienced trader, or catch a good trader on a bad day. Both could lead to disastrous losses, but Metaquotes seem to have recognised this and offered up solutions to both. With MetaTrader Trading Signals, you have the option of following a trader for free, or paying to follow an accredited trader. In the case of the former, there is no screening process for the traders you follow, so it is unwise to follow them for anything other than research purposes. However, for the traders you do have to pay to follow, there is a rigorous screening process to ensure that they have the necessary experience and skills to trade successfully. This involves monitoring their trades for a month, and if the results are not up to scratch, they will be unable to set up a subscription. This prevents you from connecting with a trader who is more than likely to lose you money.
The Trading Signals service is remarkably easy to understand and use, even if you have little or no trading experience. All you have to do is select a trader to follow, and the software will do the rest. There are no complex agreements to sign or daunting settings menus to negotiate, and the whole process takes just a few clicks. Subscription payments can be made using a variety of secure online methods including PayPal and WebMoney, and aside from this fixed fee, there are no commissions charged on trades aside from the usual bid/ask spreads charged by the broker.
You can only follow one trader on one account at a time, and the trading volumes are determined by the amount of money in your account and the leverage you have selected as compared to the same statistics for the provider’s account. This means that, while you are connected to that account, your trades will mirror those of the provider proportionally, so there is no danger of the account hitting or dropping below zero due to the provider making trades that are out of your price range.
Everything is fully automated, to the extent that you do not even have to launch the terminal to make trades, as they will be copied automatically using the Trusted Execution Token system. This means that there is no need to have MetaTrader running continuously, and eliminates the possibility that you will follow the trades of an otherwise successful trader at the wrong time.
In Part 2, we shall show you how to set up Trading Signals to copy the trades of providers, and also how to set yourself up as a provider and start earning extra money from your trades.
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