I have heard there are 15 live account FX traders for every 1 live account Futures trader worldwide. I was told this from 2 different large trading marketing firms. Does that ratio seem right? They did not have any data yet on crypto traders.
I seriously would've thought about 1|10,000, not 15|1. That sounds very whacked. After trading-for-a-living for a dozen years, I have yet to meet a profitable forex trader in the flesh. I know dozens of futures/equities/options traders.
I have no idea about the numbers but i would not be surprise if the difference was larger. Forex is much easier accessible for new traders with very little money to put in. There are also a lot of so called money managers with PAMM or MAM systems which tricks naive people into investing in what most likely will be a losing strategy at the end.
Right - getting into FX is much easier. BTW, some great PAMM managers at Darwinex where they utilize a very sophisticated ongoing risk assessment software to completely analyze all aspects of the PAMM managers trades. I have never seen anything like that for CTA's or CPO funds.
Most of the profitable traders I know are FX side - I know 3 profitable Futures traders and that's in the past 10 years.
Even at 15:1 it makes sense to me why AMP added the MT5 platform. Anyone can take that platform and connect to a range of offshore FX brokers while still trading Futures on the same platform with AMP. Just a numbers game - marketing a service to 1 trader versus marketing a service that 15 traders can use.
There is a much larger retail presence in futures than forex, the great majority of forex volume is institutional positioning and hedging.