AvaTrade launches AvaSocial - a new copy trading solution

AvaTrade has announced the official launch of a copy trading solution: AvaSocial. This new social trading service benefits all traders, new and existing, by allowing them to connect with each other to share and execute trades in a central network.

The personalised mobile application is regulated by the FCA in partnership with Pelican Trading. It integrates with all AvaTrade trading platforms to facilitate trading and allow traders to present their performance.

AvaSocial allows traders to create their own community of followers who can monitor their strategies, automatically or manually copy their signals, and analyse their performance. AvaSocial users can also communicate with other traders through the instant messaging feature.

Diane Ferguson, CEO of AvaTrade, says: "We are delighted to launch AvaSocial alongside Pelican Trading, as part of our continued commitment to support and help educate our traders. The new platform provides market accessibility and shows how experts invest their own money. By sharing and interacting on live transactions via the chat feature, other users can follow the recommendations of the experts and copy their strategies to be more likely to succeed."

Mike Read, CEO of Pelican Trading, adds: “We are extremely pleased to integrate our proprietary social trading technology solution into AvaTrade's mobile platform which connects traders and enables them to share information and knowledge. 'learn from the best' ".

In addition to being a complete copy trading solution, AvaSocial allows users to view the various strategies of the experts they follow and choose to take the opposite position, based on their own beliefs in the market.

This may be a new direction for AvaTrade, but it is a very old area for many brokers.

Social trading regulation

Social trading may well have been seen as a fad, a triumph of substance marketing that generated volume-based commissions for its developers, and which led many brokers to view it as a tool to increase the confidence of traders. novice traders, while paying the social trading provider one pip per trade in order to generate greater ROI by extending the value of the client's life.

ZuluTrade, one of the early entrants to the social trading arena, was fined by the National Futures Association (NFA) in the United States, just as the future looked bleak for these services, which has led to a very important question that other regulators who preside over good quality jurisdictions have taken note of - that this is financial advice, and in fact financial advice provided by individuals without a license and without liability to ensure the best interests of clients.

In fact, the exact opposite has happened in most social trading business models, as many B-Book brokers have encouraged leading traders, whether experienced or inexperienced, to recruit as many “followers” ​​as possible with their accounts and to reward them for it on the basis of profit and loss.

The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), despite its glaring shortcomings, is recognised around the world as the most prestigious non-bank financial market regulator.

Indeed, it may well be that its reputation was not earned by its own regulatory and jurisdictional merits, but by the high quality of the companies operating in Britain.

Regardless, whether it's a by-product or not, the FCA is the flag that flies over much of the respected element of the forex industry, its benchmark status resonating. around the world, including all of major mainland China, where MAM accounts and portfolio management are the mainstay, and self-directed traders are very rare. In essence, the FCA is doing the right thing by getting the "leading traders" to apply for an asset management license, thus considering these trade leaders as financial advisers.

In the current post-social era, those who have developed their systems themselves and have acquired a loyal following appreciate the highly advanced proprietary trading platforms and fully integrated trading environments provided by the vast majority of UK forex and CFD firms, many of which have been in place for decades, will be the driving force now.

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