Heloïse Greeff doesn’t fit the stereotype of a star fund manager. Her day job is that of a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Linacre College, where she focuses on clinical machine learning.
In her spare time, however, Ms Greeff, 30, is something of an investment sensation, one of a group of crack troops spawned by a new phenomenon known as copy-trading. More than 15,000 people using the Etoro securities trading platform have signed up to blindly and automatically replicate every investment move that she makes — in their own portfolios.
Encouraged by slick and witty television advertising fronted by Alec Baldwin, the actor, and Joe Cole, the former footballer, large numbers of mostly young and sometimes inexperienced consumers are signing up as
