As soon as you enter the world of trading, you immediately face various tools designed to help you “beat” the market: SMS signals and emails from experts, private telegram channels, etc. However, there is one tool that is not widespread in the community of traders yet. It is algorithmic trading that allows the processing of a large amount of data and usually acts as indicators or independent trading robots. Such instruments exist in the form of third-party sites and databases and are used in conjunction with trading terminals. For example, the most popular platform for trading in the foreign exchange market is MQL5.com, where you can get access to a large number of different tools that expand the capabilities of the Meta Trader terminal. You can buy both separate indicators and ready-made trading robots that will be installed on your platform. The main difficulty, though, it can be quite tricky for a novice trader to work with a massive range of instruments: easy to spend money on something useless. The second difficulty is that most of the applications and algorithms are not free. Although many of them have a trial period, this period is often not adequate to understand even the essence of work. There are free apps, yet such software usually has minimal functionality. Also, a significant disadvantage of such software is the lack of integration between trading robots and trading signals – if your broker does not support the Meta Trader trading terminal – you will not be able to use these tools.
On the other hand, there are several third-party services with which brokers, not trading platforms, cooperate. For example, Finam has www.comon.ru – an auto-following software where traders can offer their trading accounts as “signal providers”. On the one hand, it is a simple and straightforward tool, but its affiliation to a broker is obvious, and it makes the “independence” of traders quite doubtful.
A relative newcomer to the market – REFLECTO (https://reflecto.net/). This analytical trading platform uses machine learning to review and select trading strategies. For central europe traders, a pleasant bonus is the location of data centers in Europe, which provides stable and fast work (min. ping compared to Asian or American software). Of the advantages, reflecto.net has a simple and user-friendly interface. REFLECTO does not apply commissions to the followers for profits gained. Reflecto charges users for each copied trades at the rates set by the strategy providers.
InstaForex offers cooperation with the ForexCopy app. Each client of the company can be both a supplier and a receiver of signals. There’re three different reward systems: per trade, daily subscription, and percentage of profit. Everything looks quite transparent, yet you would better already have some experience in trading. The fact that anyone can become a signal provider does not seem very reliable. Another factor that causes concerns is the presence of a “referral program”. Here’s a citation from the website, “An important advantage of the ForexCopy for providers of trading signals is that all links to the monitoring of a trading account can be embedded with an affiliate code. Thanks to this, those traders who switch to account monitoring and later choose to follow other people’s signals to trade on their own will get their profits from their trades in the form of commissions for each trade”. As for me, affiliate programs are always the source of additional income that a company tries to gain if the primary source of income is insufficient.
In general, copying and algorithmic trading have proven themselves very well in the European and US markets. Fewer and fewer people are engaged in “manual” trading, and more often, accounts are “delegated” to apps that are interested in their profits. Well, as it’s known, when two people have a common goal, they will always find a way how to be useful to each other.
