Collective2 Review
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Commissions and Fees
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Trustworthiness
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Value
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Customer Service
Summary
Collective2 is a unique social trading platform. Collective2 offers to its users a way to match up traders and followers as well as many other interesting tools. Read our in-depth review to learn all about Collective2 and decide if they are right for you.
About Collective2
Collective2 is a copy trading marketplace that matches up traders who develop custom strategies with investors who want to follow them. Experienced traders can sell subscriptions to their strategies, while investors pay a monthly fee to follow them.
Investors can see how each strategy in Collective2’s marketplace has performed before signing onto it. They can also run strategies directly inside their brokerage accounts, so they don’t need to move money onto Collective2’s platform.
So, is Collective2 right for you? Keep reading our Collective2 review to find out.
Collective2 Pricing Options
Collective2 has different plans depending on whether you sign up as a Trade Leader or Investor. Trade leaders can try out the platform with a 14-day free trial. Investors can create a free account to explore strategies.
Trade Leaders pay $19 to $39 per month to list a single strategy or $99 per month to list up to 3 strategies. You can set your own pricing for each trading strategy you list, but Collective2 will take a 50% cut of subscriber fees. You can sign up for an annual plan for a 15% discount.
Investors need to buy a subscription to Collective2 as well as pay subscription fees for each trading strategy they want to copy. Collective2 plans vary based on how many strategies you want to follow simultaneously:
- 1 strategy: $49 per month
- 3 strategies: $99 per month
- 5 strategies: $199 per month
- Unlimited strategies: $299 per month
Annual plans are discounted by 33%.
Subscription fees for strategies vary, but most are between $50 and $200 per month.
Collective2 Features Breakdown
Collective2 serves traders who can collect subscription fees for trading their strategy and investors who follow and copy the trades (similar to eToro’s copy trading). Different features apply to traders and investors.
Trading Strategies
The strategies are the main reason to use Collective2. Investors can scroll through and select the strategies they find compelling. They can add strategies to watchlists or see how they work by adding them to a simulated account for free. You only have to pay for a strategy if you want to automatically trade with it in your brokerage account.
Every strategy comes with detailed performance data including annual return, number of trades, max drawdown, and percentage of winning trades and months. Trade Leaders also provide a brief description of their strategy and a complete history of every trade made since it was launched.
Finding Strategies
Collective2 offers several ways to find successful trading strategies. First, there’s a strategy leaderboard that shows the top-performing trading strategies. You can sort strategies by name, subscription cost, total return, maximum drawdown, or metrics like Sharpe ratio and win-loss ratio. Each Trade Leader also lists a suggested capital allocation for their strategy, which is helpful for investors who don’t have huge portfolios.
You can also add strategies to watch lists just by clicking the Add to Watchlist tab. This is similar to the social components of eToro, Kinfo, and Nvstr, but the rankings are based more on strategies vs. individual investors.
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Another option is to use what Collective2 calls The Grid. This is effectively a strategy scanning tool that lets you filter strategies by any metric. You can also filter strategies based on whether they trade stocks, options, forex, or futures.
There’s also the C2 Star list. This is a list of trading strategies that have been reviewed and rated highly by Collective2’s team. Collective2 says that strategies on this list have tight risk control and low drawdowns.
Auto Trading
Once you subscribe to a strategy, you can link it to your brokerage account to enable automated trading. Collective2 is not a brokerage and you never have to move your money onto the platform to trade.
Compatible brokers and trading platforms include Interactive Brokers, Tradovate, StoneX, TradePro, GarWood, IG, AMP, FXCM, CQG, Autoshares, Rithmic, ETNA Trader, and Tickmill. Collective2 supports stock and options trading as well as futures and forex trading.
You can start and stop strategies at any time and trade multiple strategies at the same time. You can limit the amount of capital each strategy has access to within your brokerage account. You also have the option to set custom stop losses for each position.
Social Features
Collective2 also functions as a social trading platform and provides traders with ways to interact. The Reviews tab for each strategy offers star-based ratings and comments from investors who have used that strategy. To write a review for a strategy, investors must have been subscribed to the strategy service for at least 30 days. Users can also message a strategy manager directly with questions or comments.
Simulator
All investor accounts come with a free simulator so you can test out a strategy or combination of strategies before you subscribe. The simulator is pretty neat because you can try being a financial alchemist, experimenting with different strategy combinations to help diversify risk or compound your performance. You can swap out different strategies, asset classes, or allocation mixes to create the most optimal portfolio in the simulator, then subscribe to the strategies to bring the same portfolio to life in your brokerage account.
Collective2 Platform Differentiators
Collective2 is one of only a handful of copy trading platforms available to US traders. The most notable competitor is eToro, which is both a brokerage and a copy trading platform. eToro offers copy trading for stocks, forex, and futures, but not for options – which are available to copy trade through Collective2.
The structure of Collective2 is also unique. Instead of being a brokerage platform with copy trading added on, it’s a marketplace for traders to come together and share strategies. The platform’s leaderboard and strategy filtering tools are very robust, and the fact that traders can leave reviews on strategies they’ve tried makes them more trustworthy for new users. The C2 Star list is also a nice feature for traders who are worried about poor risk management by Trade Leaders.
Having the ability to use your own personal brokerage account is nice, too. You can mix and match strategies from Collective2 while also placing your own trades. It’s easy to turn strategies on and off at any time, and the simulator lets you kick the tires before you commit to copying a strategy.
Is Collective2 a Good Value?
Collective2 is certainly pricey. You have to pay not only for a subscription to the platform, but also a subscription to each strategy you want to copy. A trader who wants to copy three strategies could easily end up spending $500 per month or more on Collective2.
With that in mind, Collective2 is generally a good value only if you have a large amount of capital to deploy. Ideally, you should approach the platform with at least $10,000 to copy one strategy and at least $30,000 if you plan to copy multiple strategies.
As far as the quality of the strategies themselves is concerned, there are some very good stock strategies on Collective2. The leaderboard makes it easy to pick these out. Just be aware that your actual trading results can vary from the annual return you see for any strategy. Copy trading can be risky if you aren’t careful about keeping your portfolio diversified or if you don’t keep a close eye on what’s happening in your account.
What Type of Trader Is Collective2 Best For?
Collective2 is a good option for traders who want to try copy trading, either as Trade Leaders posting their own strategies or as investors copying strategies. Collective2 offers a way for consistently profitable traders to make a little extra money by sharing their strategies with other traders. For investors, Collective2 can take a lot of the work out of active trading and help you build multi-strategy strategies that might be better than what you could achieve on your own.
That said, beginner investors should be warned that copy trading isn’t as simple as it seems. You can lose money quickly if the market changes and a strategy fails to adapt. It’s important to keep a close eye on your account and know how to manage automated strategies. With that in mind, Collective2 is best for experienced traders and investors. Newer investors are better off using a robo-advisor first or building their own trading strategies.
🏆 Top Rated Services 🏆
Our team has reviewed over 300 services. These are our favorites:|
📈 Best Day Trading Service Investors Underground 🎯 Best Stock Scanner Trade Ideas 📉 Best Stock Charts TradingView |
💰 Best Stock Picking Service Motley Fool 📱 Best Mobile Broker Webull 📊 Best for Stock Research Seeking Alpha |
Pros
- Caters to experienced traders and investors
- Tons of data about strategy performance
- Simulator to see how multiple strategies synergize
- Monthly auto trading membership fees instead of per-trade fees
- Social trading features like strategy star ratings and reviews by users
- Multiple trading instruments including stocks, options, futures, and forex
Cons
- Results are hypothetical
- Auto trading is not available for popular brokers like Ameritrade, Schwab, and Etrade
Horrible Childlike Scam with Fake Results
This is a horrible, unethical, rude scam of a company. They advertise yearly gains that are not calculated correctly on purpose. As I am a professional trader, I spent months calculating results for each major strategy on the site. Extremely few were profitable. Of those that were profitable in the SIM account, I turned onto my live account. However, this is where we ran into real issues. Every time I subscribed the strategy, the “Trade Leader” posted that “a one time error” occurred. They would find different phrases for this, for example, the next time it was a “black swan event.” Collective2 DESTROYED my account faster than any other form of trading, including Forex, automated strategies, hedge fund, stocks, even Robinhood. The Trader Leaders are unhelpful, and never offer refunds. One admitted to me that his strategy “only works in demo accounts.” It called for such a high level of margin, that one could not have the high minimum account balance advertised (about $50,000-80,000). Instead, you needed about a half a million for any of the trades to work, as almost hit margin calls. Their programmed “Stop Loss” feature also does not work half the time, leading to maximum losses and zero gains. C2’s rude customer service admitted to this fault as well. On top of that, they issued a new commercial featuring a woman who looks just like me as an “idiot trader,” similar to a dog trading. I am an employed professional trader working for an international firm and this company is the childlike one with no risk management.
I started to use Collective2 about 14 months ago. The yearly gains are based on starting equity minus the current equity, then divide the profit or loss by starting equity. The result is compounded gain or loss same as any index, such as S&P 500. One can move the courser over the performance graph and see the starting equity and the current equity. On Collective2 there are a lot of people who try to be Trade Leaders by averaging down on losing trades or increasing the number of contracts or shares after a losing trade. Eventually they encounter a market that keeps going down and the result is 90% or greater equity drawdown. The way to choose Trade Leaders is to look at their past trades. If they average down or increase the number of contracts after losses, avoid them. There are a few good traders that use proper money management and have good trading systems, but to find them you have to look at the past trades. See if the number of contracts traded is consistent. Profits and losses should be consistent, and the track record should not be based on a few enormous wins.