For the past three months we have been trying out the copy trading platform of Naga Trader. It is part of the Naga Group, a company that’s listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange.
There are a number of features of the Naga platform but the one we focused on in our review was the social trading (or copy trading as it is also known).
Naga have a specific social trading part of their website, referred to as “Top Traders” or the “Leaderboard” where you can check the records of the other social traders and see their stats. You can also sort the list by a number of different categories (e.g. performance, number of copiers, managed funds etc) and timeframes (week, month, all time).
We followed one of their traders, Mark Green, for three months, automatically copying his trades. So how did it go?
Naga Platform – Analysis
In terms of the Naga platform itself, it is nicely designed and fairly easy to navigate. There are a host of other features in addition to the copy trading, including auto-invest, which allows you to invest in various portfolios they have, an academy with tutorials on trading and a crypto wallet where you can store various cryptocurrencies and also buy Bitcoin. And of course you can trade various instruments yourself on the Naga platform including Forex, commodities and crypto.
In terms of the copy trading element, its basic functionality is good and it’s fairly easy to set up the copying of a trader. You can select to copy either a certain percentage of the trader’s volume per trade or a fixed amount per trade. You can also set fixed stop losses/take profits or just copy the trader’s.
As far as that part of it goes, the copy trading works pretty well. However, after testing it out in full for a few months we had some major reservations about the copy trading. Our main concerns were:
- A trader’s open trades are not available to view, meaning that traders could have massive losing positions that you’re simply not aware of. This risks making a trader’s record look much better than it actually is – see more on that below with regard to our experience copying Mark Green.
- Secondly, in terms of a trader’s record, it only shows you their last 20 trades, making it difficult to get a full picture of their trading. A number of other copy platforms include the full trading history of the traders you can copy, allowing you to build up a complete picture of their trading style and results. Whilst Naga does have a “stats” section providing an overview of the traders’ history, a detailed trade history including their full results would be a significant improvement.
- Thirdly – and this caught us out early on – a number of traders listed on their “Top Traders leaderboard” are simply copying other top traders. So for example we started off copying three traders who were all just copying Mark Green! Each trade was being duplicated three times. There should be a warning system in place to alert you to this so you don’t end up effectively copying the same trader multiple times. We have drawn Naga’s attention to this and we have been informed they are looking into it.
- Fourthly, we think there should be more guidance in terms of what funds you should allocate to following a trader. Other copy platforms have clearer guidance on this and minimum funds needed to copy a trader so you don’t become over-exposed. Some of the traders risk thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars on each trade so knowing what percentage you should follow them at if you have say $1,000 to risk would be helpful.
Overall these flaws in how the copy-trading platform operates greatly detract from the overall experience in our view and it is not something we feel we could recommend at this time. Our results from copying one of their “top traders” – which we expand on below – gives more of a sense of how our misgivings played out in practice.
Copy-Trading Results
As we say, we followed one of their “Top Traders” – Mark Green – who is rated in the top three in the all-time list and on the face of it has an excellent record, having made over $141,000 profit at the time of writing.
However, what you cannot see in his record is Mr Green’s open trades, which during our period of testing did very badly. In fact the losses from the open trades more than outweighed the profits from the closed trades.
We closed out a number of the losing open positions so not to be exposed to massive losses. We are glad we did so as those positions then carried on to rack up much higher losses.
Take his positions on the GBPUSD pair for example: Mark opened a trade at 1.22473 on 28th May which he just let run and run even though it kept getting deeper into the red. We closed the trade out at 1.26786 on 21st July for a loss of £306. However, since then the pair has run up to over 1.30 – meaning losses of around double what we closed out at. Another similar GBPUSD trade we closed out for a £94 loss which would also now be in much bigger loss.
Had we been able to see that Mr Green lets his open positions run up huge losses like that and doesn’t seem to utilize stop-losses, we may have thought twice about copying him.
Overall we made a loss following his trades – you can view full results here – which was disappointing.
What is worse, there is no option to copy traders in demo mode, which would allow you to see these issues before risking real money.
Conclusion – Naga Copy Trading
Whilst the Naga Copy Trading platform has a nice look and feel to it, at the moment we think there are some serious issues with how it operates – in particular not being able to get a true sense of traders’ records – and therefore we could not recommend it at this time.
If they can make improvements to the platform to address the problems we have highlighted above, then we could reconsider our verdict but for the time being it’s a NEUTRAL rating for the Naga copy trading from us.
Naga Copy Trading – Results Update
22nd June 2020
It’s been somewhat of a mixed start to our trial of Naga’s Copy Trading platform. We are copying the trades of a trader called Mark Green (who is the number two rated trader on the platform in terms of his all-time record) and so far his closed trades are £296 up, but his open trades are currently £510 down.
You can view full results here.
Hopefully the open trades will turn around but it’s a little worrying that they’ve been left open to run up big losing positions and stop losses have not been utilised.
That brings us on to broader concerns about the copy trading platform, which revolves around the limited data available on the traders you can copy.
Firstly, their open trades are not available to view, meaning that traders could have massive losing positions that you’re simply not aware of and risks making a trader’s record look much better than it actually is.
Secondly, in terms of their closed trades it only shows you their last 20 trades, making it difficult to get a full picture of their trading. A number of other copy platforms include the full trading history of the traders you can copy, allowing you to build up a complete picture of their trading style and results. Whilst Naga does have a “stats” section providing an overview of the traders’ history, a detailed trade history including their full results would be a significant improvement.
Thirdly – and this caught us out early on – a number of traders listed on their “top traders leaderboard” are simply copying other top traders. So for example we started off copying three traders who were all just copying Mark Green! Each trade was being duplicated three times. There should be a warning system in place to alert you to this so you don’t end up effectively copying the same trader multiple times. We have drawn Naga’s attention to this and we have been informed they are looking into it.
On a more positive note we like the style of the platform and it is very user-friendly, certainly one of the best UXs we have come across in social trading. We would like to see the above points addressed moving forward though.
Naga Copy Trading – New Review
27th May 2020
Today we are going to take a look at a trading platform called Naga. It is part of the Naga Group, a company that’s listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange.
There are a number of features of the Naga platform but the one we will mainly be concentrating on in our review is the social trading.
Social trading – or copy trading as it is also known – is a process whereby you can automatically copy the trades of other professional/successful traders. You can choose your own staking levels to follow them at depending on your bank size and attitude to risk.
Naga have a specific social trading part of their website, referred to as “Top Traders” or the “Leaderboard” where you can check the records of the other social traders and see their stats. You can also sort the list by a number of different categories (e.g. performance, number of copiers, managed funds etc) and timeframes (week, month, all time).
We originally joined the Naga platform a couple of years ago during the cryptocurrency craze as Naga launched their own cryptocurrency (the Naga Coin) but only recently have we reconnected with Naga and started to use their copy trading facilities.
We have been following one of their traders, Mark Green, since 5th May. He has been performing excellently, already racking up a substantial amount of profit this month.
There are a number of other promising traders but at the moment only Mr Green has shown the kind of consistency we like, with 9 winning months out of 9 so far.
The Naga platform also includes a host of other features including a wide range of markets you can trade yourself, a crypto exchange, auto-invest portfolios, a trading academy and more. So we’ll be taking a look at those in our review too.
In the meantime you can check out the Naga platform for yourself here.
The contents of this website are intended for educational and information purposes only and do not constitute any form of advice or recommendation and are not intended to be relied upon by you in making (or refraining to make) any specific investment or other decisions. Appropriate expert independent advice should be obtained before making any such decision. We cannot and do not offer individual investment advice.
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