90% of traders lose money?

You are right there! :smiley:

The last I heard, Joe Bloggs had dropped out of the forex education market as a prospect, and was buying lottery tickets and looking for an MLM opportunity …

Is it a reflection of the undisputed superiority of the female gender that it is only [I][U]Joe[/U][/I] Bloggs who is always featured in these issues and not his wife???

Mind you, in most of the MLM’s that I have heard of, they are driven mainly by women? - or is that only at the few successful higher/inner levels?

I feel like i want be be inside this circle

Are there any legit links that point to this statistic (90% forex lose money)?
Would like to know the real source, and when it was published. What I found on the internet, was bunch of articles, which quote this statistic, but never found the real source its self.

Also, with the advent of many educational programs (babypips, ff, other paid course) now, is this statistic still applicable?
Curious if we can see the statistic year by year.

First off, In ALL businesses, the success rate is still around 4-5%. Keep that in mind.

Also, again, your either trading for a hobby, or your trading to get wealthy. SO be wealthy, it takes more work then most anticipate. Add, looking at charts, crunching numbers, feeling the rush from trading in general, isnt alot of peoples cup of tea.

Then take the average association to risk, or 1-2%, over each month, because that seems to be the norm, its looks like its a Longgggggggggg draggggggggggggggged out career, that you have a great chance of failing at anyways, and just say the heck with it.

The average deposit in the US is around $6,000, but the industry standard everyone being told is $10,000… Most likely the same ones holding their hand out.

Then, you have the gurus that charge, and keep their subs in suspense for years, while milking them a messly$96 ;/ a month, just to show a 3% gain over the month, OR no profit AT ALL!!

" LOL< Today, we showed you how to lose", WTF, Tomorrow, we might lose again, but its not about the wins, its about following our shtty plan to keep you comin for more, because the law of averages says it will work", BLAH LAHBLHA

*shruggs, im in it to get filthy wealthy and be well off for the rest of my life. Failure is not an option, its a stepping stone for tomorrow.

EVERY SINGLE ENDEAVOR, is a staircase you must climb, step by step, or sometimes, 2 steps at once. You cant just levitate to the top floor, YOU_____MUST_____ CLIMB, USING EACH STEP AS A CAREER BUILDER, If that Flight is 90,000 steps, then so be it.

95+% of failed business startups, lose everything too, so dont think the whole forex failure rate is something abnormal, its the way it is with everything in life.

Following on from what Money mentions above about non-forex business.
If you want to open a shop, garage, manufacturing facility, restaurant, etc, you would likely need to run your business plan past your bank in order to borrow the funds needed, so at least an ‘expert’ gets to scrutinise your plan for any obvious flaws.
In forex you just stick your hard earned savings into a brokers account and you’re up and running. No checking that you know what you’re doing, that you have a coherent plan.
The barriers of entry are non-existent and, imho, one of the major reasons for the high failure rate.

Speaking non-specifically (if that makes any sense); if all the people who are failing were to do the exact opposite of what they had previously been doing, this would not automatically make them a great success. All the mentoring and study in the world will not necessarily turn an unsuccessful person into a very successful one.
Regarding very successful(and I don’t just mean how much money they have made), and often highly intelligent people, in my experience, they possess an indefinable intrinsic quality , something that is not quantifiable or obvious to all and sundry.
They think differently and are perceptive in a way that the majority of people aren’t and this is not something that can be “passed on”. I’m not talking about a persons intellect in the sense of their ability to study and complete a course, learn a language or even to learn to trade . I’m referring to a certain level of success which is borne from a more abstract quality.
Insight, intuition, vision …these aren’t things that can be measured by an IQ test.
…I’m sorry for going off topic a little…I do tend to ramble on a bit…:slight_smile:

If you read biographies of successful people, or even articles about them in serious publications (I.e. NOT the tabloids), a great many of them openly admit that they had many failures before becoming successful, indeed they still have failure but minimise the effect these have on their fortunes.
In forex a lot of new traders are investing every penny they have (ive even read here on BP of traders using their credit cards or family loans) and subsequently, when they lose, they cannot afford to return and try again.

I think not good idea if investing money using loan because will making problem if facing margin call account, beside not gain anything but also still having compulsory to paying back these loan, now some broker offer cent account and for learning beginner this type account less risky

Brokers, service providers, and a small proportion of traders.

(The 95% figure is an “allegation”, not a “proven fact” and actually not even a “provable fact” because there’s no centralised market and therefore no collatable evidence. My own guess is that it’s probably right, or nearly right).

Forex trading (currency trading) originally developed out of the need for businesses and people in countries with different currencies to trade.

This article will interest you: [B]History Of The Forex - Forex Walkthrough | Investopedia[/B]

I believe it. Most traders are new (the attrition rate for trading in general is staggering). They don’t really know what they are doing (I include myself in that category). Currency trading is probably the most difficult instrument to trade. On top of that, most traders are lured into the “easy money” side of it. This compounds the psychological difficulty of losses. Simply put, new FOREX traders are going to lose money. There is good news in all of this, though.

I’ve been trading for almost a full year now and I still lose most months-- okay, days. The cool thing is I have only lost about $200 in that entire year! I consider that cheap tuition for the Trading University of Hard Knocks. That is the wonderful thing about FOREX. You can trade small. In fact, my average risk is about $1.78! I trade about 4 different pairs on the 30 minute charts. My position size is always 1 micro-lot. That’s it. I’m happy to lose that $1.78. Why? Because, well it’s $1.78. I spend more on coffee every day. I hardly notice it. And like I stated before, It’s much cheaper than a university education.

I’m sure I’ll eventually move the decimal point over to the right… eventually. In order for me to do that, I need to learn to be consistently profitable taking $1.78 trades. Until then, I will continue to take “I-Don’t-Give-A-Darn” sized trades. I suggest the other 89% do the same.

Of course they are if you say so. You only need to read posts here and elsewhere to see how wrong you are, let alone look at some real evidence

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Why would modern traders be more advanced and knowledgeable than before though? Yes, people have access to the Internet, but Forex requires just as much effort and study as it did before.

See Do 90%-95% of traders fail? Some actual data

There isn’t a way to trade without losses, and it would be a huge mistake to try.

Expectancy is what matters, not win-rates: you need to develop of a way of winning more, collectively, from your winning trades than you lose, collectively, from your losing trades. Aiming for the highest possible win-rate (i.e. losing as few trades as possible) [B]isn’t[/B] typically the right approach.

If you look in beginners’ textbooks such as Van K Tharp’s[I] Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom[/I] or Michael Harris’s [I]Profitability & Systematic Trading[/I], you’ll find explanations of the reasons why it’s typically easier for aspiring traders to become profitable from lower overall win-rates than from higher ones. It may sound surprising, but it’s so. Probability and statistics are counterintuitive subjects, but they’re subjects of which every trader needs to develop some understanding, to achieve any success. And the time to try to do that is [I]before[/I] you start practising/experimenting.

There isn’t a single, objective “right answer” to this question: it depends on your account-size, type of trading, location and a range of other factors. This section of the forum will help you: 301 Moved Permanently

There could be number of reason for a trader to lose money. Major problems are lack of proper money management. There were 50% trader (among the looser) who made profit from their 71% trades but still lost money! (a survey of 2016)
Emotions, and trading phycology is another major issue for the new traders. Even trader lost all the profit after a win trade, due to use higher leverage.
Anyway, my broker (Hanseatic Broker) has 1:50 leverage by default until you change it. I suggest the same. Practice a demo account lower leverage and then go to live. Or you will miscalculate in live trading.

Hi Lexys,

About the let winners run and cut losses short theory which you (and others) have regularly proponed: I have a question - how do you balance the letting of the winners run - with the need to not be greedy. Have found that a winning trade is running to about 25 - 30 profit, but decide to let it run rather than profit, and then it comes to 10 - 8 pips and close before it goes to zero. So how do we balance this ? Is this all about the find the correct exit point with technical validation : you know like when it has resistance and looking at the SMA etc ?

Thank you

I don’t believe in this over rated statement “let your winners run and cut your losses”, certainly not for an intraday trading approach. It’s an entirely subjective statement, counterintuitive and results in diminishing returns, overall.

At the end of the day, if you have a large enough sample size of historical trades, with subsequent data for each, you will already know the optimum risk to reward. Surely this is the end result all aspiring traders want to get to, eliminating all “guess work and gambling” of letting a trade run or cutting losses too early.

As with so many things, this is a concept which has been greatly simplified and presented in the wrong context very often. The foundation of the “let your winners run” recommendation comes from Prospect Theory and its idea of loss aversion. Basically what it boils down to is we tend to feel the pain of loss more than we enjoy winning. When I say losing, I don’t just mean in nominal terms. I mean in relative terms. This is where the cutting winners short thing comes from. We fear giving back what we’ve already made, so we book the profit and fail to let the trade run its course per the parameters of whatever system we employ.

You can see this whole thing come into play with so-called “hedging”. Traders don’t want to take a loss, so they irrationally put on an offsetting position because they think it prevents them losing.