Public.com Terminates Social Trading

Public.com, which built its brand as “the social investing app,” has decided to end its social trading services. These features allowed users to view other traders' activity and insights on the markets.

Public Pivots Away from Social Trading

Announced yesterday (Thursday), the platform said the move was driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools and services.

“The core use cases of the social feed used to be people posting recaps of earnings calls and bite-sized updates on what’s happening in the markets on a given day,” Public wrote in a blog post titled Sunsetting Social. “Now, this exact content is created by AI—faster, more accurate, and embedded throughout the product experience, showing in the most relevant context.”

Public is now positioning itself as a multi-asset trading platform. It offers trading services in stocks, options, bonds, and other instruments. The platform also provides margin trading and crypto trading, with crypto services powered by Bakkt.

The company has quickly adopted AI to launch new tools and products. Last month, it introduced Generated Assets, an AI-powered feature that enables users to turn any thematic idea into a custom equity index.

Copy Trading Still Holds Its Ground

Public is not the only firm moving away from a social trading model. eToro, which went public last month, was also originally known for its social trading features. However, it has since evolved into a broader trading platform—though it still maintains its legacy copy trading services.

Copy trading remains widely used. Data from Brokeree Solutions shows that copy trading accounted for between 6% and 20% of brokerages' total trading volume in recent years. In 2024, firms that actively promoted copy trading and integrated it into other services saw 10% to 20% of their volume come from this segment.

Read more: Copy Trading Brings up to 20% Trading Volume for CFDs Brokers

Search interest in copy trading has also grown steadily. According to Google data, search queries for “copy trading” have increased by about 20% year-over-year for the past four years. Average monthly search volumes have doubled since the end of 2020.