We’ve all seen them, those bot-like adverts that appear in the comments section of websites, featuring a ‘person’ just dying to share the good news that they have made a fortune by working just a handful of hours per month.
Of course, most of us are wise enough not to give such adverts – and they are posted by bots – any credence. They are a con in the same manner as those “casinos can’t stop you using this one simple trick to make money” adverts that blight 1000s of websites.
For most of us, those type of adverts are merely an annoyance, and we will never click on them. Yet, another unforeseen circumstance is that these spam adverts may have clouded our thoughts around the idea of real online investment. That is to say the platforms that give us access to financial markets and investment tools from the comfort of our homes.
Spam advertising shouldn’t discourage investment from home
The point is that the ‘too good to be true’ aspect of these spam adverts has made many of us believe that investing from home is also tainted a process, when it is nothing of the sort. It can be good for your finances, or bad, in the same manner as employing a high street financial investor can have a positive or negative outcome.
Let’s take a step back and consider what it means to invest at home, specifically from an angle of social trading. First of all, you are not guaranteed to make money. Rather, you are given the platform to potentially make money. In a way, social trading platforms are tools, and it’s up to the person using them to see what they can make of it.
The idea of online investment platforms as tools is important, as it gets to the root of how to use them. Like any tool, it can be used properly or poorly. Using it properly means taking advantage of the full spectrum of options available to you: copy trading (the process of automatically following expert traders), data, trends analysis, tutorials and so on. Using social trading platforms poorly is essentially about eschewing those options, steaming in and trading assets without the proper diligence.
FinTech has opened up trading to an online community
It should be pointed out that even following all the rules of using social trading platforms properly does not guarantee profits, but the act of doing so should increase your chances of making a profit. The difference highlighted there should be as stark as going to a reputable financial investor to look after your money and blindly investing money yourself.
None of this is meant to put investing on social trading platforms from home up on a pedestal, but to highlight their role as digital disruptors of the traditional financial industry. In fact, there is evidence that traditional Wall Street traders are moving towards using the platforms themselves.
Social trading, or more aptly, FinTech, is breaking down the barriers between those of us who haven’t and those who have had access to financial markets in the past. It’s not about “making money at home”, but rather accessing the outside world of finance from home. That fact should be kept firmly in mind by anyone looking to explore the new opportunities in investment provided by FinTech companies.
