Perhaps to give free rein to the dream of living off income or simply to make their savings profitable in times of inflation, many small investors have entered the financial markets in recent years. A field in which profits are never guaranteed and it is easy to lose money when you do not have training. In this context, copy trading has burst into force, a method that consists of replicating strategies, operations and portfolios of experienced investors, with the possibility of doing so in real time and automatically thanks to new technologies.
In this way, anyone can duplicate the positions of successful investors by allocating capital to proportionally mimic the most popular portfolios, in addition to being able to access their statistics and copy the strategies of other investors. A practice that, however, is not without risk.
There are several brokers that have made this modality available to their users for a long time. This is the case of eToro, which introduced it in 2010 and today has 2,800 popular investors. A distinction that is obtained after meeting various requirements and that gives the right to a remuneration, the amount of which increases when a level is promoted. "Payments range from fixed amounts at lower levels to a percentage of the assets that copy them at higher levels," explains Tali Salomon, regional director for Iberia and Latin America of this platform.
Among the most copied are young people from generation Z such as the Australian Kurt Donnelly, dedicated full-time to investing since he was 20 years old, or the Slovenian Neza Molk, a Biotechnology student who at 19 began his investment career buying pharmaceutical shares. On the list of the Spaniards most followed by other traders are Francisco Javier Gómez Pastrana, who stands out for his investment strategy in companies that increase their dividends every year; Óscar Naveiras Picos, who invests mainly in technology stocks from the United States, Asia and crypto assets, and José Ángel Zabalegui Labarta, a former bank employee, entrepreneur and investor who has around 4,800 copiers. "I apply the strategies that we followed in the bank's treasury (...), an environment in which many positions have to be managed on a daily basis and released," he explains.
Zabalegui, a graduate in Business Administration and a university professor, asserts that his strategy is "quite controlled", with an average risk of between 2 and 3 out of 10. "Practically half of that of buying a normal index," he clarifies. His recipe for success in copy trading? “What people value the most is consistency – doing what you say you want to do – and not changing course every two by three, because what is most appreciated is professionalism and seriousness,” he replies.
However, following popular investors is by no means an infallible method, as was verified by the thousands of small investors who in July of last year lost all the money invested –17 million in total– after following the advice of a well-known financial YouTuber. and replicate the movements of a trader who operated in Roboforex. "You should not invest in the stock market if you do not know how to operate in the financial markets," advises the well-known trader Francisca Serrano, author of Day trading and stock market operations for Dummies, who considers that, more than a practice to operate on the stock market, copy trading is part of the "marketing" of brokers and platforms to attract users.
