The second part of the wide traders survey shows that only 27% lose. This is the total opposite of what we’ve seen in US brokers’ reports. Here are a few speculations about this figure and more interesting numbers.
See the first part of the forex traders survey, showing the reasons to trade, popular currencies and lots more.
In the answer to question no. 22 in the survey, 27% of respondents said that they had a negative return in the past 12 months, 38% said the return is between 0 to 25%, 15% between 25% to 50%, 9% between 50% to 100% and 11.1%, with a high return of over 100%.
With the new CFTC rules, US brokers were forced to release the profitability rate of their traders. Most US brokers reported a profitability rate of 20% to 30%. One broker stood out with a positive profitability rate. And here, over 3000 respondents reported around 3/4 success rate instead of roughly 1/4.
How can this be explained?
One explanation is that the survey doesn’t meet statistical standards, and accidentally met a bunch of successful traders. Another, more logical explanation could be that most lost traders just burned out, never returned to trade forex and therefore weren’t the target audience of the survey.
A third explanation could be that many traders are in denial of their losses. Denial of losses means that the traders don’t encounter their mistakes and don’t learn the lessons for the future.
What could the reason for the 73% success rate reported here?
Other findings are:
- 53% of traders use a combination of both fundamental and technical analysis. 36% use only technical analysis.
- Nearly half of respondents trade short term.
- Leverage varies from no leverage at all to more than 100:1.
- 26% use hedging methods.
* Numbers have been rounded.
More data can be found here
Methodology of the CitiFX survey: Over 3000 traders responded to an online survey that was posted from September 8 to October 8, 2010 on four high-traffic FX websites: FXstreet.com, ActionForex, ForexPros and ForexTV. The 25-question survey took approximately 5 minutes to complete. The survey results are tabulated in two parts, this is part one about Traders’ Profile, Environment, Resources and Technology.
Where are you in the statistics?
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