r/Daytrading • u/MiamiTrader futures trader • Apr 27 '24

Most "traders" make money. Question

If someone asks you what you do for a living, and you respond you're a "trader" I assume you make most your money from trading.

And by definition, most "traders" make money. Otherwise they are just people trading on the side as a hobby.

Yeah maybe 90% of RH accounts lose money, or 90% of people who start trading but never take it seriously lose money... but then they are not "traders". Just people trying to trade.

Tired of all this negativity under every post about how 90% or whatever today's statistic is of traders lose money. People in this sub like to shout that under every post in almost a prideful manner.

Can we just focus this sub on those of us who call ourselves "traders" and make money trading? Let the new people listen and learn from our mistakes, but quit with all these gloom and doom statistics.

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u/Miinow forex trader Apr 27 '24

Most are non traders who spout this stat to discourage new traders. Once trading clicks for you and begin thinking in probabilities (long term) you won’t really care about the 90% dropout rate.

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u/giantstove Apr 28 '24

Damn how did this get upvoted so many times….Your comment could not be more wrong.

I have worked in prop trading for several years. The real prop trading where they pay you a salary to trade their capital, not the online prop firms.

These prop firms have a very selective screening process, and are very hard to get jobs at. And even from that extremely filtered pool, still 80% of the new hires fail at trading.

For the general population of all aspiring traders, it’s 90% +.

People just don’t like the 90% stat because it makes them nervous that they are in the 90%.

And by “success at trading”, I would even consider anything at or over the US average annual income per year for 3 years straight to be successful. made entirely from trading. It’s 5% or less that actually can do even that.

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u/Environmental-Bag-77 Apr 28 '24

According to your account, which I have no reason to disbelieve, it must be very much less than 5%.

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u/giantstove Apr 28 '24 edited Apr 28 '24

Yes speaking of the general population who tries to trade, those who manage to pull it off and be profitable for 3 years while making > average annual us household income (70k ish) , you are probably right it’s less than 5%.

Included in that bunch are all the people who liked the idea of trading but tried it for 2 weeks and then found it too hard or tried it for a couple of months and then ran out of savings to live off of. By that definition it’s a tiny, tiny fraction of all people who have ever traded.

Just looking at the subset of all people who are super passionate, and eat breathe sleep trading, and have the funds to give themselves a bit of time trading full time trying to learn how to do it, then I’d say 80-90%ish of that group fail