Whom to Follow on social trading services? A system to support discovering expert traders

Social trading services, the financial services connected with social networking services are in the spotlight. With social trading services, users can follow and automatically imitate expert traders´ trades. Finding expert traders who have good, consistent performance to follow is one of the key challenges. To address this issue, we propose a system we call W2F (Whom to Follow) to help users discover expert traders. By analyzing a trader´s trading history and comparing it with that of other traders, W2F estimates traders with three measures: performance, risk, and consistency. The results are visualized to help users make decisions on whom to follow. We describe experiments we carried out to validate these three measures and demonstrate the usefulness of W2F on the basis of a user study.