What qualifies as a good social trading platform?
Leverate’s Adinah Brown takes a pictorial insight into social trading platforms and how to stand out from the crowd!

With social trading becoming increasingly popular, the number of social trading platforms out there has also grown to meet the trend. The problem is however that not all of them are very good, to the extent that most still have a long way to go in terms of development.
Numerous problems are associated with only providing a single copy trade mode, poor execution and losing orders that were made, providing too few masters because the database is not big enough and only being available to a desk top platform.
For a broker shopping around for a top performing social trading platform, we have identified those features that need to be at the top of your criteria list. “A broker is only as strong as the technology that serves it” therefore, it’s imperative for you to ensure that you have the technology that will keep you ahead of the pack.
Large pool of available masters – A crucial feature for extending a client’s LTV and their frequency of engagement is a social trading platform that offers a large pool of available masters to follow.
Leverate’s social trading platform Activ8, has more than 100 participating brokers, who combined form a community of traders running into the hundreds of thousands. This represents a large community of traders who are all actively trading as well as able to copy and mimic strategies from amongst each other.
Multiplicity of following – Related to the point above, a standard social trading platform will only allow for a ‘one on one’ or perhaps a ‘one on more’ social following. In contrast, a more robust social trading platform can offer much greater flexibility in terms of facilitating a complex network of masters and followers.
Cloud trading – Remember the days where the only thing we thought you could do on a cloud was dream? Well a good social platform should also be able to let you trade on a cloud. The benefit of which means if you close your computer and log out your account, any order that you last made will be kept on the cloud drive as pending, ready to be executed when you log back in.
Minimum required deposit – Where other forms of trading can require hundreds of dollars as a minimum deposit, a good social trading platform should be able to facilitate one lot being subdivided into several mini lots, making it possible for a traders to invest with just a mere $10.
This minimum required deposit can be key to a broker’s acquisition results. Effectively making the trader’s risk relatively insignificant, it allows them to develop skill and knowledge, before they feel comfortable trading with bigger bucks.
Wide range of instruments – Besides trading forex, variety should be key in a determination of what should qualify for your broker’s social trading platform. A more robust platform should also be able to offer commodities, CFDs, stocks, indexes and many other kinds of valuable & popular investing instruments.