Why Do 95% of Traders Lose in Forex?
Most traders lose in Forex because they jump in without a plan, ignore risk management, and let emotions drive their trades. The market isn’t the problem-discipline (or the lack of it) is.
Where does that 95% figure come from?
Is it reality, or a guess, or an assumption?
The properly regulated brokerages that are obliged to publish quarterly figures generally report that over a 3-month period, they have around 75% of losing customer accounts on their books and 25% profitable.
But this is hugely misleading, because it’s measured over only 3 months.
Most of those 25% that were “profitable” have done only 1 trade during the period, in other words they weren’t really “trading” as such. Mostly dormant accounts.
The director of the UK’s “FCA” regulator, giving evidence to the British parliament, last year, said it was under 1% who are profitable at all, over a year. And that’s among the customers of the world’s best-regulated brokers: it must be significantly lower than 1%, anywhere else?
The main reason is that the entire CFD industry is set up to deceive people by fooling them into imagining that they’re trading something, when in reality they’re just betting against a counterparty on the price-movements of the mostly-unregulated counterparties’ own “products” which have been created for people to bet on them against the firm controlling them while holding the customers’ money and making up and interpreting the “rules”.
Nobody’s going to do that profitably, long-term!
![]()
The very few who manage it for a while obviously switch to futures, where they can combine high leverage with effective regulation and genuinely trade in a genuine market (without “spreads”!) where the brokers really are brokers, all have the same prices at the same times and are all incentivized for their customers to win, not to lose. Nobody switches back! ![]()
CFDs are just a mostly-corrupt industry designed to attract gamblers.
Agreed as most of the new traders are poisoned with thinking that they will become rich right after joining this industry so they take it like casinos or gambling to push buttons in order to get rich whereas the reality is totally opposite to what they are being told by the five minutes influencers over the internet.
annual profitability is far rarer, especially with CFDs; curious if anyone here actually switched from CFDs to futures and found execution/price integrity notably better? Sources for that FCA comment would be great to bookmark
What does “price integrity” mean? They’re exchange traded financial instruments. There’s no spread. The price is the price. It’s objective and verifiable and completely transparent. It doesn’t depend which broker you use. Whichever broker you use, they’re buying/selling the same item from the same place, on your behalf.