Direct evidence of the 90% failure rate

Last month I presented some evidence backing up the idea that 90% or more of traders fail. What I talked about there was mainly based on performance data (returns). I’ve been doing a bit more work with the data I have on-hand and found something else worth reporting.

My data features 1157 traders who indicated they were newbies (0-1 years of experience). I took a look to see how many remained active throughout the study period and how many quit somewhere along the way. I focused on those who were in the dataset for at least 12 months, which is 1122 traders. Of that group, only 97 were still active in the final 6 months of the study period. That means about 91% had quit somewhere along the way.

And how long did those traders actually stick around, you might ask? On average it was 6.47 months, with a median of 4 months, and 75% were at 9 months or less.

So if you are able to stick around in the markets for more than 9 months, apparently you’re way ahead of the game. :slight_smile:

Frankly, I don’t have any interest on this data! Because, I believe my trading knowledge and experience! Here, pro trader’s trading strategy don’t help me similarly, this horrible statistic is not going to kill my trading equity! I have only one year trading experience and now I am interested on live trading! Yes, I know it’s a challenging profession but not impossible!

Perhaps it’s the wording of your reply, but saying that you have no interest is not exactly thankful for the continued evidence that rohdytrader provides to all of whom are here. As I’m sure you already know, there is indeed little evidence of where the 95% failure rate comes from, whilst rohdytrader continues to support it with real ‘academic’ data which is a far cry from the [I]armchair answers[/I] you will see floating around this forum and others.

I have only one year trading experience and now I am interested on live trading!

It’s great that you have the motivation and accept that it will be a challenge, however the failure rate should never be ignored; regardless of how successful you are - even if this is your first year whilst waiting to move to live trading from what I can only assume has consisted of demo trading (as you stated above).

Could you at least open your account/s with your nice smiley, friendly spread bet firm because they send you the most polite margin call e-mail warnings in the industry & say THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS, DO CALL AGAIN in big capital letters when they take your dough…they also call you sir.