After months of tweaking, the new, unified eToro Trading Platform is officially open for use by all eToro clients.

Emerging from an invite-only beta development phase, the leading social trading network is now encouraging all users to access the new trading platform, soliciting feedback for ongoing improvement and development.

The new platform is a culmination of the company’s history as it seeks to merge the various offerings that the company has developed in one place.

Indeed, eToro has built a reputation for itself as a leading exponent of social and copy trading; offering its clients a transparent and democratic trading experience, in which leading investors engage with a community of followers to share their trading strategies.

Its original proprietary platform gamified the trading experience, employing a more simplified, aesthetically appealing user interface, using graphics to convey key information.

Of course, as a brokerage company, eToro also allows its users to execute trades, recording and placing orders for its users. Thus, as its popularity increased, it had to respond to the demands of more sophisticated traders. To do so, it made MetaTrader 4 available to its clients, including an assorted array of functional capabilities, retaining more advanced data and analysis for traders.

The new eToro trading platform seeks to combine these functions into a unified trading platform, which is consistent across operating systems and devices.

Following on from our more detailed sneak preview of eToro’s new trading platform back in March, here is a recap of what users can expect.

Unified Trading Platform

The new platform builds on eToro’s position as a broker with a unique social trading offering, allowing users to access both the trading and social offerings in one place.

Moreover, the new platform creates a unified appearance across all devices; a useful development given the difficulty in switching between trading and social platforms on apps in the past. Users will also benefit from a coherent experience regardless of how they access the platform.

The new platform continues eToro’s OpenBook model of a single page layout, creating a non-cluttered display of one feature at a time. While this provides a cleaner and simpler feel, more active traders may miss the ability to display multiple functions at once, such as data feeds, charts and other trading tools. Although the company maintains that all trading tools are only ever one click away.

Focus on Leaders

The new platform resonates with eToro’s ‘Popular Investor Program‘ and copy trading functionality. Popular and succssful investors continue to be treated as other assets would be, with their own performance and social feed pages.

Indeed, all clients can allow their trades to be uploaded to the eToro network where they can be displayed in a number of statistical ways, such as by the amount of profit made.

Copy traders can search for leaders based on a number of criteria, including risk score, number of copiers and performance filters, which existed in the past, as well as new parameters such as assets under management and the percentage change in copiers.

Watchlists

The company also highlights the new watchlists that are available. In addition to markets and assets that the trader wants to follow, such as share prices, commodities or currencies, users can also keep an eye on leaders. eToro users can therefore, via a graphical interface, monitor a portfolio of leaders that they are copying.

Trading

As mentioned in our previous post, another major change, based on strong user demand, is the initiation of real-time stock trading. Currently, stocks are available for purchase at the end of trading each day and resemble more of a mutual fund than equity trading product. With the upgrade, this model will be changed to allow for real-time trading, as well as short positions. By the end of the year, eToro also plans on expanding its available stocks to trade reaching over a thousand.

Relatedly, users will have access to charts as well as Risk Management and advanced portfolio management tools, which can be customized to meet the users’ preferences.