New tech for a new age of social traders

Why the evolution is happening in the first place

While older generations may have a skewed view of millennials, we are the furthest thing from lazy. Instead, we look for ways to make tasks easier; allowing us to accomplish far more. With that said, a change in the way we invest was almost inevitable. We wanted better ways to access information; now we have a vast internet of data and things that gives us access at an instant. We wanted better ways to communicate; so we created social networks, smartphones, and forums that allow us to connect with our friends around the world any time from anywhere. Finally, we wanted a way to make more money in the market; and social trading was born!

Tech powered social trading

Social trading is more of an idea than an actual product. It's the idea of taking the trading process as we knew it a few years ago and adding in a mix of social data acquisition tools and automated systems to make it more efficient. Those tools could be ones we already had that literally had nothing to do with the market, or they could be new tools recently designed to give social traders an edge up.

• Personalised Trading - Smart Algorithms - Social sites like Facebook personalise your experience by providing you with recommended content based on pages that you have liked - the algorithms that power such a personalised experience are very advanced and are now been used by social trading platforms to personalised and tailor trading recommendations based on the traders that you follow.

• Automated systems - More and more we are seeing automation slip into the trading world. This is a scary concept for some traders, but for others it's a blessing. A new breed of social trading platforms like copyop automate the trading process whereby you simply follow successful traders and copy their trades (automatically), when they place a trade the platform places the same trade - strike price, asset etc., for you. Of course, the trick to automated trading is to follow and copy other traders who have a high success rate.

• Real-time Streaming Trading Analysis- Lately we are seeing the emergence of technologies that allow traders to tap directly into the social sphere for streamed analysis. Sites like StockTwits correlate and analyse enormous amounts of data that enable traders to put their fingers directly on the pulse of the market in real-time. Such tech driven tools are very powerful and designed specifically for those who are more socially aware. This is 21st century market analysis millennial style!

• Popular Trending Assets - If you look at any news website you will see a section for trending stories from across the web that same technology is now been used in trading, but instead of been offered a selection of trending news stories you are provided with a selection of trending assets - making it easier for traders to pick up and capitalise on trends. For example, StockTwits offers what's called the heat map. It's literally a map of assets listed by industry. The green, red, or gray colour of the asset indicates if the trend is bullish, bearish, or neutral; giving traders the ability to quickly look at the heat map, find trends, and know which way the trend is headed.

Final thoughts

The bottom line is that technology has giving birth to a new wave of traders and is powering the evolution of social trading. Market analysis that would have taken hours, upon hours of research in the past, can now be done in a few minutes.

Indeed, it is now at the point where investors don't even have to place trades anymore they can simply automate the process. As I said at the top of this post - millennials are not lazy - we just look at smarter ways to do things. Yes, it makes life easier and is less labour intensive, but that has been the modus operandi of humans since time began.