You have done your research, and you are getting ready to trade. All that is left is for you to develop a copy trading plan.
Develop a goal and a spending budget
The first question you should ask yourself is why you are going into this business in the first place. Is it just that you need some extra cash, or do you have bigger goals? Be honest with yourself because only knowing where you are heading will help keep your feet on the ground if things don’t work out quite as well as planned. If money-making is essential to you, you should also establish what income (or wealth) level you want to reach. Having specific numbers will make sure that your efforts are always in the right direction.
Once you have set your goals, look at how much money you are willing to spend on your trading account. You should never spend more than 1% of your initial deposit per month. If one strategy doesn’t work out for you, then chances are another will, so there is no need to invest all of your capital in this one business idea. Many players allocate around 25-50 USD/EUR/GBP for this purpose, but others might require different amounts according to their circumstances.
Having made these decisions, it is time to write down every step that needs to be taken into practice to accomplish them. The overall theme should stay clear in your head even as individual goals will change depending on the market situation.
Develop a strategy for copy trading
Having money to spend is easy but investing it wisely is much more complicated. There are hundreds of different ways to invest your funds, but none of them is necessarily better than others. If you have never invested before, you might follow some tips and tricks to get the best possible chance for success.
First of all, it’s essential to have one or two strategies in mind at any time so that your money isn’t being thrown around without purpose. It doesn’t matter if these ideas come from other traders who have achieved excellent results or simply because they sound appealing to you. What matters is that they enable you to reach your goals faster.
This is where your copy trade comes into play. The first step here is to open an account at a broker that offers premium services to its clients. Make sure that the software is easy to use and requires little or no configuration on your part. Once you have done this, go ahead and search for other players who are experienced in what you want to achieve and use this broker. Make notes about their behaviour, take screenshots if possible.
Choose one of these successful traders as your avatar (that’s what they are called), someone whose knowledge you respect and who has achieved good results for how long he or she has been investing his own money in markets. Copy everything that player does right down to the smallest detail until you understand what makes him so successful and why you should follow his example. If your account starts losing money, you should stop immediately and review what has happened, analyze the market situation, your trading plan, and the actions of other traders who are not doing as well as they were before.
Returning to the original question: once you have developed a strategy, decide whether or not this will be an ongoing business for today, tomorrow, and maybe even next year. If this is going to be a long-term project, then set goals for yourself such as “I want to reach x amount in 1 year”. Instead of hoping for meteoric gains, it will give you something realistic to work towards, which could leave you disappointed and broke.
Plan for success
Once all of the above is done, it’s time to start managing your account.
Keep in mind that even the best strategies will fail if you don’t stick with them. There are periods during which you will lose money, accept this fact and learn from what has happened instead of getting discouraged and giving up. Remember that nothing is permanent except change when you feel like quitting, so stay focused on your goals.