Survey: Why 90% trader's failed?

I don't think that the greed depends on your deposit. You can simply blow up with $500 and $15000... That's the special feature of the human psychology.

question for ya, why you here???

Hi Julexo, i'm a long time reader of FF but never registered , i'm here like many other , for reading , learning and helping if i can.

I'm an EA dev and lot of my EA have strategy idea come from FF forum .

90% of new traders i see start trading forex with a very very small account like 500$ and start to put 0.10 lots.

After the first margin call , again 500$ try EA,forex signal services etc... and fail again.
some add 500$ and start to learn and try to be more reasonable and other say "this is not working".

this is why i write my opinion because only 20% of new trader stay in this business and half of the 20% become successfulsful trader.

25-35% annual ROI (for me) is a successful trader


sorry for my english is not my mother language.

regards

You have just answered the question. I love this. If you dont have a tested and proven method/strategy, then you are not a trader

poor money management and greedy. Always think to get good return in short time.

I think that many failures are connected with a lack of practice and patience. People want everything "here and now".
I believe that it would be better to spend more time on learning and backtesting than on losing your money on the real account which you have opened not long ago.

All about losing is managing trades and money.
If you stay with SL12 than your only concern is to do not have bigger loss at all.

I'm not sure its greed so much a not knowing where the limits lie on a chart. After all, it can all look quite random to a newbie and even those who are long experienced. Which is probably why teaching trading seems to be one prominent route post a trading career.

After you delete your first account, and than second a third atc.... after that you will understand how it is possible

Disclmainer: First off I want to make clear that I'm not (yet) a consistently profitable full time trader, I have a full time job and trading at the moment is a hobby I aspire to turn into a profession. I don't have 10 years experience in the markets and to be perfectly honest I'm relatively new to all of this (<12 months experience). I actually reverted from trading live back to demo in an effort to give my self a real chance of having a solid framework and execution policy before risking my hard earned capital.

With the above out of the way, I'd like to offer an opinion on the title of this thread. With the brief insight I have on this point, I'd say that the real underlying cause of the 90%/95%/99% statistic being thrown around is basically down to the fact that this entire business is designed to take money from people, the retail market mechanics almost guarantee the odds so that retail traders will lose one way or the other. Most of the learning material available to new traders is unfortunately flawed and written by people not qualified or experienced enough to write it. The majority of brokers are parasites who misinform, beguile and essentially defraud their customers and make a good sum of money doing this. Things like spread betting, binary options and other forms of bookie based trading are designed to take money out of your account. Even the software you use to place trades is designed in a manner that it can cause you to fail. When you take all this into consideration you can see how it's pretty much a miracle that anyone makes money.

Now to the good news... it is possible to make money this business but you have to start by becoming extremely sceptical of what anyone posts/claims/advises, this is an industry geared to make you lose so to stay afloat you're going to have to remain extremely vigilant. This will appear slightly contradictory as I'm about to make some recommendations but come to your own conclusions on my suggestions (never stop being sceptical!).

The best sources of learning material are typically the old and obvious titles which people overlook for the fancier & more complex sounding titles, books like "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", "How to Trade In Stocks - Livermore", "Trading for a living - Elder" & "Market Wizards - Jack Schwager" are like gold dust in the saturated trading literature market. Psychology has a big part to play, accepting the risk of each trade and analysing your performance over a series of trades and not individual trades.. extremely vital to your success and emotional stability."Trading in the zone - Mark Douglas" is highly recommended for grasping these concepts.

Defining you "Edge" is probably the most difficult thing to learn as to me it's specific to your own beliefs about the market. I've gone round the houses starting off like most with flawed indicator based signal entry and then onto astrology like solutions such as Fibonacci ratios & Harmonic Trading.. all with inconsistent results and always overshadowed with the "it's very subjective" cloud. I eventually settled on my own version of Supply & Demand... having originally watched every video recorded by Sam Seiden I delved deeper into price action with order flow to bring it all together to form my own understanding of the markets based on Supply & Demand. I found the following extremely helpful along the way:

Lovejoy price action - http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=288707
Price Action II pdf http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=380676
James16 Classic - http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=2331
pipEasy position trading / breakout post - http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=245149
wmd trading post - http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=206723

Last but not least, you need a trading journal and a written version of your entry rules / money management / reward:risk rules in front of you when making any trading decision or analysis. If you can't stick to your own rules then you're in trouble... plan the trade and TRADE THE PLAN!!.

Your mission is to be in the 1%, good luck my friend!

Nice and very motivating. I am on the same way to the winner 1%. Thank You!

I think only reason that comes to mind is control your temptation. Use SL & TP wisely, live another day for trading. No emotions involved in trading, do not marry to a position.

Sure that's not so simple. There is a bunch of knowledge for learning. There must be experience too. If the whole point was just about psychology and setting SL, TP, that would be just too easy.

I think most unseccessful traders know what they should be doing but can't/won't actually do it. People look in the wrong place (holy grail) for the answer to their problems when they need to work on themselves. Like you say there is a bunch of info out there on how to actually trade. If it was easy to follow rules and trading plans then there would be a lot more successful traders.

It's damn hard to follow rules and trading plans, especially for lazy people who have seen too much marketing hype/BS on how to get rich quick through FX..

If we consider Forex as our social, we will see 10% people have total fortunes equal 90%. Forex reflects our life.
I think 10% trader win money of 90%.

Truly, many have found themselves entangle by their approaches with no promise of profit. I will advice everyone to plan their trade and trade their plan.

lack of knowledge about forex trading
poor trading method
mismanagement of money

People fail because they fail to educate themselves on the market. Get informed. Technicals are king!!

True! also do not forget about backtesting! it is a great way to check your trading skills

Almost all trading methods/approaches work. The problem is that they can not work all the time and the timing of their application is the issue. People will suddenly begin to think that they are missing out instead of being happy with what success they have and sticking with it. They become traders who only want to follow. They fall for those stupid threads written by 'trading social workers' who claim to have developed methods that will generate 99% success rate. It comes down to self belief IMO. If you have that then you can survive most markets and be profitable.