Copy trading vs a robo-advisor: which fits you?

What a robo-advisor actually does for its fee

It handles allocation and maintenance so you never have to. A robo-advisor asks a few questions about your goals and risk tolerance, then builds a diversified portfolio — usually of low-cost index funds — and keeps it balanced, reinvested, and often tax-optimised, all automatically.

That service is the product, and for someone who wants a sensible, diversified, entirely hands-off portfolio and never to think about it, roughly 0.3% a year is a reasonable price. It is not trying to beat the market; it is trying to give you the market, tidily.

What copying an investor does instead

It puts you alongside one person's actual positions. Copying is not a diversified, risk-profiled allocation — it is a mirror of a specific portfolio of names chosen by one investor whose decisions you are now following in real time.

The strategy is that person's judgement. Importantly, applied to their own money, and in public. That is a strong proposition if the record is real and you want active selection, and a weaker one if you simply want diversification.

Is the fee difference the real difference?

Important to know: A robo-advisor mostly holds index funds that charge around 0.03% themselves. So the robo adds roughly 0.3–0.6% for managing them. You could buy those same funds directly for the 0.03% and skip the robo layer entirely.

So the honest framing is not "Copying has no management fee and beats a 0.3–0.6% robo" — it is that the robo's fee buys diversification and automation you may genuinely value, while copying is free but hands you one investor's portfolio and single-manager risk instead of an automatically spread, self-rebalancing one. You are not paying more or less for the same thing; you are buying different things.

So which fits you?

Choose the robo if you want diversification, automatic maintenance, and no reliance on any individual's judgement — that is a good approach for most people, and it is a sound choice.

Choose to copy an eToro Pro Investor if you specifically want active selection that might beat the market, and you are fine with the higher risks that might entail.

As always, do your own research - a good starting point might be my article on how to verify an investor's track record.