Following Other Stock Market Traders

With all of the trading websites, services, blogs and chat rooms available these days on the Internet it can be a trick to decide who you want to trust or follow. Following someone refers to watching them trade and making the same trades they do in the hopes of becoming profitable.

Some traders post their trades on their blogs at the end of the day. This works if your swing or long term trading. There are stock people that start and run services where you can pay to have access to their trades. Lots of chat rooms exist where traders post their trades throughout the day as they make them. Internet sites such as Covester and Stocktwits are two such places. Many bloggers are now setting up chat rooms within their sites to attract visitors. Any number of ways to follow someone exist.

Opportunities present themselves in many different places throughout the online world to take the easy way out and shadow someone else’s trades. The problem lies in finding traders that are good and consistently make money. There are literally thousands of people online trading these days. Finding the good ones is not always easy.

The braggarts are the most tempting, and usually the most dangerous. If you fall in with one of these you could lose big. Some of the really good guys are braggarts in their own right, it’s just a matter of trial and error finding out who’s real and who’s not. Best to work on that in a paper account. Some post their winners and not their losers, so you can be drawn in by a false pretense of high percentage winners. There are those that make a trade and wait to see which way it goes before posting and let you know about the good ones loudly. Do your research and be careful.

Pay sites sometimes started out as free blogs or a good trader posting trades in chat rooms. These are the business persons. Like the dealer on the street, they get you good and hooked on following them, then announce that they are going to start offering a premium membership. In my experience these are usually some of the best traders out there. They have to be to get and keep any business. At least in this case you know what your getting. Most of the time they try and keep their other thing going, but usually it is just to much. Some of these fail as the trader wasn’t really good enough to pay for his service, and sometimes their followers are just offended. If your making money consistently you don’t have a bad deal as long as your profits outweigh your costs.

The worst, and some of the ones you can make money following, are the copiers. The ones that take trades from other good traders and then post them as their own. You may never know the difference.

If it’s from a site you don’t know or use you could go on forever following this guy, the whole time thinking how good he is, and never knowing the truth.

Gurus come and Gurus go. Some have a nice spurt because of some factor or another and then fade into oblivion. There are those that are OK traders and just happened to have that one super year. Of course a lot are steadily consistent and make a good living. There is the flash in the pan, one hit wonders and even just great story tellers. Sometimes an exceptionally long trend is caught and can make someone look a lot better than they truly are. Point is Gurus have their streaks. I find it better to pay for a service I want to try by the month. That way I can find out if it’s the real thing, or just another flash in the pan, and if I am convinced I can always take him or her up on the savings per year deal.

Whatever you decide to do, the best thing is to know what your doing. Accomplish this by educating yourself and learning how to do it on your own. Then follow someone for the convenience of it if you should so chose to do so.

About the Author:
Joel Weihe. Trading stocks, forex and futures. Selling real estate in the great state of Kansas. http://elditto.blogspot.com/

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