eToro Review
The eToro platform offers a good selection of standard brokerage features, like watch lists, price alerts, news feeds and customized charts. But where it shines is its unique community and automated trading models.
CopyTrader and Popular Investor
CopyTrader and Popular Investor are flip sides of the same coin. When users enroll in CopyTrader, they can duplicate the crypto trading strategies of leading traders, termed Popular Investors.
There’s no fee to participate—Popular Investors are compensated by eToro directly—and once you’ve made your trading bones, you can apply to be a Popular Investor yourself.
You can also use eToro’s related offering CopyPortfolios to replicate the performance of crypto-focused portfolios managed by eToro. This effectively turns eToro into a kind of hands-off, no-fee robo-advisor for cryptocurrencies.
Social Trading Community
Social-media-like feeds of user thoughts and comments are present throughout the eToro platform. You see a general feed immediately when you log in that covers user thoughts on crypto, markets and investing broadly.
When you navigate to each coin or managed portfolio, though, you gain access to a unique feed that presents user posts related only to that specific offering. These comments may be helpful in sparking trading ideas for those new to the crypto world, but keep in mind that their quality is not assured.
eToro Club
The eToro Club is a premium membership that affords users with more features based on their balances. (Officially, eToro calculates this based on your “realized equity,” equal to the amount you’ve spent to buy securities at eToro plus your cash holdings.) Membership is available once users have $5,000 of purchased crypto assets or cash holdings in their eToro account. Membership grants users:
- Dedicated expert trading support
- A market newsletter and analyst reports
- Live webinars
- Early access to new products, services and features
Mobile Apps
The eToro platform supports two separate apps: the eToro Cryptocurrency Trading app and eToro Money wallet app. Both are available on Android and iOS. The trading app approximates the web platform, while the wallet app enables users to send and receive tokens as well as convert cryptocurrencies into other coins.
Users must understand that the eToro Money wallet app is the only avenue to transfer coins off the eToro platform. This is a necessary step if you want to maximize security by storing your crypto holdings in an offline cold wallet.
Not all competitors let you move your coins off their platforms, and eToro holds a competitive advantage for offering this critical feature. Unfortunately, be aware that you will incur a fee to do so. If you plan on using an exchange to buy coins and transfer them elsewhere for storage, you may be better served by a platform like Gemini, which offers a set monthly amount of free transfers off their platform, not to mention lower trading fees.
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