People often say that 95% of traders lose money, but that number is not supported by offical survey statistics and is more of an expession of the opinion that a lot of traders do lose money. We finally have some official statistics! The Australian Securities and Investments Commission says 80% of Binary Options traders lose money, while the percent with CFD and forex traders is 72% and 63% respectively. The findings are published in June in a paper titled “Improving Practices in the Retail OTC Derivatives Sector”. A recent ASIC review of 57 of forex, CFD and binary options brokers also identified a number of risks associated with the financial instruments offered to retail investors. Frankly, those numbers aren't as bad as imagined they would be, but they're still pretty bad, in my opinion.
Especially bad when you consider that if you're a disciplined "Price TA" trader, it's almost impossible to lose.
Placing random trades with controlled stop loss will hold you near the breakeven. Greed spoils everything! But its great that the myth has been debunked, it gives the inspiration to work harder
3-6 Sharpe, is low to mid end performance, some of the high frequency trading systems that i currently have in development have double digit Sharpe
Wrong way round mlawson , the closer to 50% making money the less chance you have of consistantly beating the market, you want mkts where as higher percentage as possible are losing money ( outside of commissions).
I have no such systems but in theory: A system of trading that has 2:1 reward/risk ratio and a 50% win rate and gives 1 trade a day (ie. 250 a year). Has a sharpe ratio of over 5. Even a system with 1.5:1 RR ratio and 50% win rate and 1 trade a day has a sharpe ratio of 3.