eToro is stepping up its efforts in the Philippines where it is seeing encouraging uptake and huge potential for its patented “copy-trading” and multi-asset platform. eToro’s patented Copytrader feature allows users to copy multiple investors simply by a click of a button, at the same time giving access to the risk score, gain, track record, portfolio composition among other information to keep the process transparent.
Founded in 2007, eToro is one of the first financial technology companies to introduce a social element to online trading and also apply copy-trading technology. The idea is that by interacting with other traders, watching others, and essentially copying their trades, one can start trading easily without any previous trading experience, but more importantly, learn — which strategies work and which do not.
In the past three months alone, eToro has hosted two big events in the capital, Manila, with hundreds of traders in attendance. With the focus to continuously grow its community in the Philippines, eToro is set to organize several offline events along with their consistent online campaigns to attract more Filipino traders to the eToro platform.
“It’s been said that Filipinos are not investment-minded; due to lack of awareness, knowledge and a degree of intimidation with financial instruments. Perfectly normal. But from what we are seeing, social trading is now democratizing participation in stocks and other assets trading,” said Paul Familiaran, eToro Business Head of Southeast Asia. “eToro is achieving this by ‘socializing’ the prerequisite financial analysis,” Familaran added.
“We consider the Philippines a major market. It helps very much that Filipinos are very social- savvy. As a social trading platform, the ability to share insights and information so as to enhance trading performance is inherent to eToro thathas actually patented an ingenious copy-trading feature,” added Familiaran.
The particular feature allows users on the platform to copy other traders. The copiers can check the trading history, portfolio, risk score, and performance among other things to decide who they wish to copy, providing even beginners without any experience an opportunity to invest in financial markets. As for the copied traders, they earn a fixed payment every time they are copied, and can get up to 2% of their Annual Assets Under Management (AUM)— the amount traders allocated to copy their portfolio— monthly, should they apply under eToro’s Popular Investor Program.
“It is much akin to the sharing economy brought mainstream of course by the likes of Uber and Airbnb,” said Familiaran.
