Common wisdom is that 90-95% retail traders lose money, although these are not perfect statistics. There is no question that most people could not make money as easily, or as quickly, as they assumed. In fact over 99% of retail traders lose money.

It’s not that retail traders lack intelligence, although some of them do. It is that trading is difficult. You are doing against professionals, including large finance companies, that deploy math, statistics, computer science, research etc. What are the odds of a street basketball player winning against an NBA player? … 99% of basketball players don’t earn money on playing basketball 🙂

New traders assume they’ll be in the 5% because they think themselves smarter than most. Trading isn’t about being smart. It is about having adequate capital, strategy, risk management, discipline and investing multiple hours every day honing your method (heard of 10,000 hours rule?). Most retail lack those.

We also must realize that this hard work must be done ourselves. We can buy courses and read books for ideas on how to do things, but it is still up to us to put in the work to make ourselves consistently profitable. A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE CAN NOT BE BOUGHT.

Trading for 0.5 to 2 hours and making a living is the end result of this work. Intense work comes prior. Many people see others working 1-2 hours a day and enjoying the good life, and think it is easy and they can do that too. They end up skipping all the steps that the successful trader took to achieve that lifestyle.

Trading is hard work, and I do believe it is possible for those that are dedicated to succeed at it. Focus on improving your own trading, don’t listen to others talking about outlandish success or devastating failure. What happens to you is based on what YOU do. Focus on implementing your strategies and improving your problem areas. Find your strengths and capitalize on them.