Discuss

Brand new to this - is copy trading actually worth it?

Aug 22, 2026 3 replies
FI
first_steps_eu
Author
Original post

Hi, I am completely new to trading and would like to get started, so I am after some suggestions. I have been watching videos on it, and people who trade stocks seem to end up on eToro. It looks simple enough - you find a trader and follow them - but I keep reading that the fees there are steep. Is there something better suited to crypto?

I am looking to put in around EUR 2,000, either behind a trader or into some straightforward fund app, hoping for something like 10-15% a year. What would you use, and is eToro worth it?

Real experiences would help a lot.

Jul 30, 2026
EX
exam_copier
Member

It is copying your friend's answers in an exam. Neither of you finds out whether they were right.

Jul 30, 2026
CA
capital_first
Member

It is fine as long as you have enough capital to absorb the same hits the person you are copying is taking. Nobody has a clean record, and plenty of professionals lose a lot of money along the way and still end up ahead overall - which is the only part they care about. Just go in carefully.

Jul 30, 2026
NE
netsale Founder

The most sensible line in your post is "10-15% a year", and it is also the
reason this will be harder than it looks. Nobody builds a leaderboard for that
number.

Every copy-trading list you will meet is sorted by return over a rolling
window, usually 30 days. A trader making 12% a year with small swings does not
appear near the top of that list, and often is not on it at all. The names you
will see instead are the ones whose window happened to contain a very good
month. That is not a conspiracy, it is just what sorting by return does.

Some numbers from the accounts we archive, so the shape of it is concrete. Of
1,517 copy traders we track, the median worst fall from their own peak is 22%.
473 of them have been down 50% or more from their peak at some point we
observed, and 150 have had the deposit zeroed and restarted. Those are only the
ones that happened while we were watching — the exchange itself publishes 30
days, so anything before that is invisible to everybody, us included.

Three things I would do with EUR 2,000, having got all of this wrong myself
first:

Split it. Two or three traders, not one, and not because diversification is
magic — because a single trader's worst month is a coin flip you cannot see
coming.

Ask for the worst moment rather than the average month. How far down did this
account ever go, and was it ever liquidated. If that number does not exist
anywhere, you are funding an experiment, which is fine as long as you know
that is what you are doing.

Withdraw the profit as it appears. A blown cycle only takes what is still
sitting on the account, and every trader I have followed for long enough
eventually had one.

On eToro versus something else, I will not recommend a platform. The fee
difference is real but small next to the thing that actually decides your
result, which is that you are choosing a person from a 30-day window on every
one of them.

Sep 14, 2026

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