No they don’t
They say that 30% of their traders are profitable in a given 3 month time period. That means the value of profitable trades over that period exceeds the value of the losing trades during that period
It doesn’t mean that those people where profitable before that period, and it doesn’t mean they will be profitable in future
A trader could deposit 100K at Oanda, lose 75 thousand, but be lucky enough to make a dollar in profit over the 3 month reporting period. That trader would be classified as profitable, despite being in the position of having a history of the most appalling losses and facing the prospect of having to make 400% returns just to get back to break even !
When the figures where first compiled, Oanda reported a huge number of profitable traders. On closer inspection, most of those profitable traders where dormant accounts with profits of a few cents earned in interest paid on the account balance !
The reality didn’t stop the marketing departments of most retail brokerages attempting to spin the message that vast percentages of clients where profitable.
One of the long time members here at babypips is currently undertaking research into client win rates as a part of his PhD thesis, and he has access to real life brokerage account information from a fairly large sample of accounts. I can’t remember how many profitable accounts there where from the tens of thousands analyzed, but it was ridiculously tiny, a handful at most if I recall correctly
If you want further proof, look at trading results from Zulu trade, curensee, myfxbook etc.
Do any of those sites have 30% winning traders, seriously, do any of those sites have a single profitable trader with a multi year track record ?
If you download a bunch of data for their tens of thousands of busted accounts, over practically any 3 month period you want to choose, you’ll find about 30 percent of those accounts where profitable, and that’s exactly what you’d expect by random chance