Giordano Salvatori, founder of STA · 21/10/2026 · 5 minutes read
Some do, most do not. Put like that it sounds like a stock phrase, but there are numbers behind it, and it is worth looking at them before you open an account.
In the European Union, anyone who offers CFDs, meaning contracts that track the price of an asset without you owning it, has to state plainly how many of their retail client accounts lost money over the last twelve months. These are mandatory warnings, and you find them at the bottom of brokers' pages. The published percentages change from one provider to another, but they almost always sit between roughly 60% and roughly 90%. In other words, out of ten accounts, six to nine are losing.
Little, if you read it wrong. It is not the probability that you will lose, and it does not say how much is lost. An account counts as «losing» even if it left fifty euros on the table, and another counts as «winning» even if it made five. It does not tell apart someone who quit after a week from someone who has done this for ten years. It refers to leveraged CFDs, not to all of trading, and every broker has its own clientele.
What it does say, though, is clear: making money consistently is the exception. Anyone who promises you the opposite is selling something. If you want to learn how to spot that, we wrote a guide on reliable trading signals.
Almost never for a single reason. Usually three add up.
The numbers below are made up, they are there to show how the maths works. They are nobody's result.
| Loss on the account | Gain needed to get back to even |
|---|---|
| 10% | 11,1% |
| 20% | 25% |
| 50% | 100% |
It is the arithmetic of drawdown, the fall of the account from its peak. The lower you go, the steeper the climb back. That is why small losses matter more than big gains, and why we took the time to explain drawdown.
They have no trick. They have boring habits, and they keep them even when they do not feel like it.
None of these habits makes you a winner. They keep you in the game long enough to find out whether your method works, and that is already far more than someone who starts without rules manages.
A method that in theory earns a little can in practice become a method that loses, just because of costs. The spread is the difference between the price you buy at and the price you sell at, and you pay it on every entry. Commissions add up, and on derivatives there can be funding, a periodic payment between those who are long and those who are short. The amounts are small, but they repeat.
An invented example: if every trade costs you 0.1% of the capital committed and you make five a day, in a month you have spent about 10% of that capital before the market has even decided who is right. That is why trading less is often an advantage, not a limit. How to read a platform's costs is a question that deserves an article of its own.
The most honest way is to try it with a demo account, treating it as if it were real: same capital, same share of risk, a stop before you enter, a diary. After fifty trades you have a figure of your own instead of a hope. We explained how in the guide to the free demo trading account and in the one on how long to stay in it. A demo account has one limit, fear weighs less, so the results are usually better than the ones that follow.
If you are starting from zero, the main guide is trading online: what it is and how to start consciously.
STA does not promise profits, and nobody should. It offers trading cards for crypto and US stocks on OKX, built by ten artificial intelligence agents who debate each other in the Bull and Bear debate, and every card has its stop. The DEMO is free forever, with real prices and the same cards as REAL, so you can watch how a written method behaves without putting money in. The history is public and verifiable on GitHub, losses included, because honest numbers are the ones you can check.
Every card as soon as it closes, with the result and what STA learned from it. It's free and you don't need to sign up.
Follow the channelA DEMO account with virtual capital and real prices, the same cards as REAL users.
Try DEMO for free →This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Trading crypto-assets involves a high risk, including the total loss of the capital used. Numerical examples are for illustration.
Risk management in trading: how much to risk per trade, how to calculate the position and how to use a stop, with made up examples and a demo account.
Trading online with artificial intelligence: what AI can do, what it can't, how to try it on a demo account and how to spot those who promise too much.
Is trading online worth it? It depends on the costs: spread, fees, swap and slippage. What really weighs on a small account and how to do the maths first.
