What's a realistic annual return for a professional trader?

I'm just a newbie at trading, but in my opinion, the greater the account balance, the less % at wining for retail traders. It will be easy to double or more a small account with some experience, greed and fear control and some leverage. When you have a big account it will be hard to get big % of return because you will use less leverage and for sure make bigger entries and the big boys will get some attention over them.

Just my 2 cents.

JL

From brief research into forex so far this my fear that fx is rigged against retail trader. I am starting to think that spread betting blue chip stocks on a 2 to 4 week horizon is more realistic option.

I am reading about FX spreads widening by 10s, 100s of pips and taking out stop losses being quite a common occurrence, I don't see that this hunting could happen on stocks, may be I am wrong.

The sky is the limit

I'm only slightly surprised to see such a very wide range of opinions over something that's actually fairly close to being a factual question.

Professional, full-time, successful forex traders working for financial institutions - the people who earn the 7-figure salaries and annual bonuses - are typically expected to double their account, or thereabouts, over the course of a year (that equates to about 6% per month, compounded 12 times annually), so the answer to the original question is perhaps around 100%. Or, at least, that's a starting-point for discussing variations from that figure.

I'm of the view that retail traders tend to vastly overestimate gains. Most professionals that I have come across (with some exceptions) have generated reasonably modest returns. The huge sums they make are relative to the large amounts of money they trade.

Hi, thanks for replies.
I agree with jarty, usually retail traders tend to overestimate the gains.
Many novice traders don't realize that 1000% annual return it's extremely difficult to achieve, and it's impossible to keep this statistic for more consecutive years.
It's much easier to achieve variables gains that oscillate around 10% to 50% yearly for example, for more consecutive years.

Yes, I preferred not to put it, because I wanted to make an overall average.

What do you mean?