What the research says

Why these numbers are worth knowing

Almost everything written about trading is written by someone with a reason to make it sound achievable. Course sellers, brokers and platforms all do better when more people trade. That does not make them liars, but it does mean the picture you get by default is the optimistic one.

There is a second body of work that has no such incentive. Financial regulators publish what they find when they look at broker records, and academics publish what they find when they get access to exchange data. Those studies cover hundreds of thousands of real accounts, and they mostly say the same thing.

What to do with them

The point of these pages is not to talk you out of trading. It is that the numbers tell you which parts are hard, and they are not always the parts people expect.

Trading more does not help. Persisting through losses does not, on its own, teach you anything. And the difference between the traders who do well and the ones who do not shows up in their past record long before it shows up in their confidence. All three of those are measurable, and all three are things you can check on your own trading.