User:Orfia/sb

eToro is social investment network that allows its users to follow the financial trading activity of other investors and copy them.

History
eToro was founded in 2007 in Tel-Aviv, by brothers Yoni Assia and Ronen Assia together with David Ring. eToro’s founders wanted to make the world of financial investment accessible to everyone through the company’s initial financial trading platform, which was a download only product, incorporating graphic trading visualizations which conceptualized the trading process as a race between currencies or a currency tug of war. Later the company expanded its product offering by launching a professional trading application, “Expert Mode”, and a web based trading platform “WebTrader”.

In 2010 eToro launched the eToro OpenBook social investment platform, along with its "CopyTrader" feature. The eToro OpenBook enables investors to view, follow and copy the network's top traders automatically.

Between 2007 and 2013 the company raised $31.5 million in four rounds of funding to help it expand the business.

Operations
eToro’s main research and development office is located in Tel Aviv, Israel. Additional eToro offices exist in the UK, Cyprus, and Australia. The company has approximately 250 employees.

In 2013, eToro introduced the capability to invest in stock CFDs, with an initial offering of 110 stock products. That same year, eToro was authorized to offer its services in the UK by the FCA regulatory authority, under the subsidiary eToro UK. In January 2014, eToro added Bitcoin CFDs to its investment instruments.

Three months later, in April 2014, eToro added 130 British and German stocks composing the FTSE100 and the DAX30 indices to the company’s stock selection.

In its public statements the company has reported that by 2010 it had 1.5 million registered customers. By the end of 2013 it reportedly had over 3 million accounts. eToro is regulated by the CySec authority in Europe, and authorized by the FCA in the UK.

Services
eToro’s social trading services are based on a live stream of trading data that is uploaded to the eToro OpenBook platform for everyone to see.

Each user automatically has all their trades presented in their eToro OpenBook profile where other users can then view their trading statistics. Users can then set their accounts to copy any investor on the network, in which case the eToro system will duplicate each trade made by the copied investor in the copier’s account.

eToro’s selection of investment instruments includes currencies, commodities, indices, stocks, and Bitcoin. All of the investments made through eToro are executed in the form of CFDs.