The historically hard-to-break world of investing in stock markets and currencies has been cracked wide open. Today there is no need to be a fat cat or fund the yachts of Wolf of Wall Street style stock brokers. You can do it all yourself with the help of free online market trading platforms.

Having spent many hours researching this new opportunity, I’ve been experimenting with eToro.com which has over 300m users worldwide. It was recently featured in the BBC 2 documentary “Traders Millions by the Minute” and the Financial Times.

One of the best things on eToro is the CopyTrader feature. This lets you literally see, follow and copy the investments of other top performing traders. There’s also lots of training material and videos to help you out, and it’s free to create an account and use.

Start trading with a reasonable deposit and learn the ropes slowly. I think $200 is a good amount to get the most out of the learning curve by trying out a few different markets. If nothing else you’ll learn a great deal about various investments and industries.

So far I’m up 28% on my initial deposit of $200, but of course it can be volatile and you can lose money, so don’t throw your life savings into it!