Following Other Stock Market Traders

by: Joel Weihe

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 and
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/