NAGA is a German social trading platform that allows people from all walks of life to access more than 950 professional trading instruments. It started out as a fairly simple online multi-asset broker in 2015 and grew to add capabilities including Forex, cryptocurrencies, stocks, commodities, ETFs, CFDs and other forms of trading.
In this interview, NAGA co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Bilski discusses its evolution towards a “social trading” environment that makes it easy for users to copy other traders with its unique Autocopy feature.
Please tell us a little more about yourself?
Hi, I’m a German serial entrepreneur and former professional swimmer. At the age of 21, I co-founded Angelplatz.de, one of Germany’s leading e-commerce shops for fishing equipment. I also co-founded the fashion startup Swipy.de and the eBay-search engine Swipybay. I’ve also studied and graduated from EBS University with M.Sc. in Management. But since 2015, all my focus is on building NAGA and making it the best choice for traders across the world. We’re already one of Europe’s fastest growing retail trading platforms, currently serving 1 million+ customers in over 100 countries, but I believe this is just the beginning of something much bigger.
What is NAGA and what is it trying to achieve with social trading?
NAGA is like Facebook in the trading industry. We aim to cover a wide range of investors’ needs in one place, so they don’t need to operate on several platforms at once. You open just one account, and you can communicate with 1+ million users, copy their strategies, hold real stocks and crypto, pay for anything around the world with a NAGA Card, participate in fun events and educational seminars, get free education, and win awesome prizes in trading challenges and giveaways. We believe the social aspect just makes trading so much better.
What is it about social trading that appeals to younger generations especially?
For most people, trading might take years to master, so social trading is a great way to not miss out on earnings during those years while still learning. In short, it means having your own group of chosen and trusted experts whose trades you copy automatically while you carry on with your life. Best part of this all – trading beginners can benefit from the knowledge of experienced traders and copy their trades in a click, while the “master traders” gain copy bonuses from their copiers!
What can the average person in these age groups expect to achieve through social investing?
In short, it means investing on an autopilot. All you have to do is look out for leading traders based on their trading results, and you copy their trades with a single click. This is very handy if you do not have time during the day to follow and trade the markets yourself. Additionally, if you are succeeding in your trading, you can get copied by others and benefit from a copy bonus generated by your copiers. The more people copy you = the higher the copy bonus grows.
How does cryptocurrency, and specifically NAGA coin, help to enable social trading?
Currently, the main use case is that NAGA Coin lets investors save more than 50% of their social trading fees if they pay them with our coin, not e.g. Euro or other fiat currency. We’ll be introducing additional ways to benefit from the NAGA Coin in the future.
What does it take to become a NAGA Popular Investor?
Autocopy lets you automatically copy other traders’ trades while you carry on with your life. However, if you wish to become a popular investor, you have to trade yourself and be good at it, and preferably also grow an audience on all social media networks, educate the followers etc. It all boils down to trust and results when someone decides whom to copy trade.
Do you welcome greater regulation in the social trading space?
I’m certainly open to regulation because security is a must for people just starting out. Regulation would push every copy trading platform to create the best experience for its users and to help them avoid mistakes such as entering too big amounts relative to their account size etc. As NAGA is a publicly regulated company, we continue supporting any further developments in regulation to provide a safe and fair trading experience for 1M+ traders around the world.
NAGA aims to be a “super app” for investing, crypto, payments and even social betting. Why does it make sense to combine these services in just one app?
It’s just way more convenient for people. You no longer need to use one app for news, one app for charts, one app for crypto wallet, one app for stock investments, one app for investment education, etc. On NAGA, you can access everything in one place, plus we’ve also recently introduced a payment feature and debit card, so everyone can directly buy things with the profits made, without sending them to another bank and paying transaction fees.
For more information on how copy trading works, check out NAGA’s website at https://invest.naga.com/copy-trading/.
