What Percentage of Traders Make / Lose Money?

How Many Traders Actually Make Money?

I think a lot of people are drawn to the idea of forex trading because they have heard that it is possible to make a lot of money working from home in front of a computer, and is quite an exciting profession.

However the reality is that very few people are able to consistently make money from forex trading, let alone make a full-time living from it.

It has long been said that 95% of forex traders lose money, meaning that only 5% of traders actually make money, but the increased transparency from the new ESMA rulings suggests that this figure may actually be inaccurate.

ESMA Statistics

As a result of the new European regulations set by the ESMA, forex brokers now have to openly state in their disclaimer what percentage of their traders lose money, and the number of losing traders is actually a lot less than 95% in many instances.

I have already pointed out in a previous post that 79% of IG’s traders lose money, but Forex Magnates have conducted their own survey that looked at the figures quoted from many other brokers and it is a very similar story.

Here are the results of this survey:

(source: https://www.financemagnates.com/forex/brokers/which-brokers-house-the-most-winning-clients-post-esma/)

Results

As you can see, there are several well-known brokers where 80% or more of their account holders lose money, such as Admiral Markets, Forex.com, Plus 500 and Easy Markets, but even the highest, Vestle, is 86%, which is less than the 95% figure that is so often quoted.

Furthermore, you can see from these results that there are many brokers that seem to have a lot less losing traders, and therefore a lot more winning traders, which completely dispels this 95% of traders lose money statistic.

For instance, one of the brokers that I promote on this site, Markets.com, state that 27% of their account holders are profitable, while 35% of traders make money with eToro (possibly because traders can also copy the signals of other traders) and 36.3% of traders make money with AETOS.

Closing Comments

It is not clear why some brokers have more winning traders than others. It may be because some of the brokers that have more a lot more losing traders tend to attract more newbie traders, who are obviously a lot more likely to lose money, while some of the brokers with a lot of winning traders are more attractive to the more experienced traders.

The point is that the average number of losing traders from the 30 brokers that were surveyed was 76.3%, which is a lot less than the 95% figure that is often quoted within the industry.

So it is fair to say that 76.3% of traders lose money and 23.7% of traders make money because this is based on real results from across the industry.

If you would like to open an account with a forex broker, this page lists some of the main factors that you should consider, and recommends brokers that are suitable for both newbies and experienced investors.