"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime."

That's a very universally applicable quote, and it definitely applies to investing and trading.

With technology becoming better and better, many untrained investors have started to use software platforms to copy the trades of gurus that they follow and like.

While the appeal of this certainly makes sense, there are a number of risks that most people do not consider before blindly copying others:

1. Copying others assumes that your risk profile and financial situation is exactly the same as theirs, which is fundamentally flawed. To highlight this with an example, a person just starting out with a net worth of $100,000 should not be taking the same risk as another individual worth $5 million — they can spare putting 1% of that $5 million into a speculative investment (i.e. $50,000), lose it and barely feel it. But for the person just starting out, $50,000 is half their life savings.
2. You become heavily reliant on the other person sharing you information about their activity. In other words, if they ever disappear, you're stuck on what you need to do next. On the other hand, if you've developed the lifestime skill of investing and trading with confidence, you'll feel much more secure no matter where you are and what your financial position is, because you will know what you can do as soon as you have more money coming in. An example of this is weathering through short-term losses to gain wins in the long-term – it's a process that can take a huge toll on you emotionally, and you may end up selling out early because you don't understand that's just part of that person's strategy.
3. You don't know when the other person has actually bought and sold their trading positions (in terms of timing) —  in the end, you're relying on the assumption that the communication of information to you about their activities is real-time and immediate. In the case that this information isn't immediately conveyed as soon as it happens, you could very well be buying or selling at the wrong time (because by the time you've received the information, the market has shifted, and the window of opportunity may have already passed).
4. Many so-called 'experts' that send out timely SMS trading activity updates to buy / sell certain stocks only do so because  they are affiliated with brokers, and they can profit from you making those trades — regardless of whether you profit or not. Usually, a telltale sign is when they try to get you to stick to using a specific broker.

Like anything else, investing and trading in stocks is a learnable lifetime skill that you can pass down to future generations (i.e. your children). If you desire to have true freedom and financial control over your destiny, it only makes sense to become well-versed in it.

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