oops ! thanks bstay 320,000 / q3 2010 accounts of 15,023 = 21.3 trades per account per day hmmmm, wonder if they're including demo trades
How did forexmagnates site get those numbers and where is the official/regulatory site to view the rest of the brokers' reports? Is it interesting to see FXSOL losing clients quickly, while Oanda seems to have 3 times the number of active non-discretionary accounts (besides showing twice more profitable accounts).
By signing up for an account (or at least going through most of the process). The brokers are required by law to state their client profitability to new clients at signup. That's all of them, and there is no official site other than the NFA that would hold this data, but they don't keep a public record of these statistics (yet).
interesting, didn't know that are 'they' picking on fx brokers do you know Trader KGB, or does the profitability disclosure also apply to stocks and futures and options brokers ?
According to this, the 95% of traders fail thesis isnt correct, more like 70% fail. I wonder how accurate these figures are?
Nowadays with every forex brokers, you get 30 days free demo account and you can jump from one broker to the next broker trying out each firm (after complaining how bad the spreads are, lol). It would be really dumb to lose money learning forex, and that "95%-traders-fail" thesis also included anecdotes that each typical account was under capitalized (over leveraged) and refunded at least 6 times before the trader gave up. Maybe the other losers had no more money and hence account became in-active and not included in the calculations?
this may in part answer the why of Oanda's 50% client profitability, they have more clients with larger account margins than the other brokers in the list "In addition to the legally required statistics, FXCM have also released to us additional information, breaking down profitability by trading account size: Equity Range . . . . . % Profitable $0 â $999 . . . . . . . . . .27.89% $1,000 â $4,999 . . . . . 40.52% $5,000 â $9,999 . . . . . 42.36% $10,000+ . . . . . . . . . . 47.74% It's interesting, although not unexpected, that traders with larger accounts are more often profitable. However it's still true to say that in all categories most traders are unprofitable." http://trading-gurus.com/fxcm-release-extra-forex-trader-profitability-statistics/ "To follow up on previous discussion from Monday, here's the profitability by account equity range broken down on a quarterly basis (as opposed to previous monthly figures)." Jason Rogers FXCM Representative Equity Range . . . . . % Profitable $0 â $999 . . . . . . . . . .20.91% $1,000 â $4,999 . . . . . 33.12% $5,000 â $9,999 . . . . . 37.37% $10,000+ . . . . . . . . . . 44.09% and post #56: "In the weeks ahead we will be releasing more details on profitability broken down even further, for example by currency pair, to give you more insight into trader profitability." http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?p=4116326&posted=1#post4116326
Quarter-to-quarter figures hide the long-term figures. During any given quarter ~70% of the clients at these brokers are losing. Extrapolate that out over many quarters and you'll eventually arrive at >90%.
I think what ElectricSavant's already said, that the 'Oanda profitability' is directly related to leverage, Oanda's maximum leverage has always been 50:1 while the other brokers go as high as 500:1 I just switched back to trading my Oanda account having lost a 500:1 broker, it got me thinking again about this thread because in a sense, the 50:1 leverage means slower trading, it provides a larger decision time / space while I still want high leverage, I think the higher loss rate at the other brokers is due to those clients not knowing what they're doing and doing it at high leverage - a speed too high for them to control