It is the first question anybody asks, and almost every answer online is written by someone selling a course. So let's use the one source that has no incentive to flatter: the brokers themselves.
Under FCA and ESMA rules, any broker offering CFDs or spread betting to retail clients in the UK and EU has to display, prominently, the percentage of its own retail accounts that lose money. It is not marketing. It is a legal obligation, the figure is updated periodically, and it sits on their homepage whether they like it or not.
I read five of them on 10 September 2026. Here is what they say.
What five regulated brokers disclose
| Broker | Losing accounts | Products covered | Read from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pepperstone | 79.6% | CFDs | pepperstone.com |
| Plus500 | 76% | CFDs | plus500.com |
| XTB | 74% | CFDs | xtb.com |
| IG | 69% | spread bets and CFDs | ig.com |
| CMC Markets | 68% | spread betting and/or CFDs | cmcmarkets.com |
Between roughly two thirds and four fifths of retail accounts lose money. That is the honest answer to the question in the title: yes, people make money — but a clear minority of them do, and the majority who don't are not a rounding error.
Read the wording carefully. The disclosure counts accounts that lose money over the measured period. It does not say those traders never had a winning month, and it does not say the remaining 20–32% are all quietly wealthy. It is a much blunter instrument than the confident percentages you'll see quoted on social media — which is exactly why it's worth more than they are.
Three things the number does not tell you
It isn't the same as "80% of traders fail". An account is not a person. One trader can hold several accounts, and a dormant account with a small loss counts the same as a blown one.
It varies by broker for boring reasons. A broker whose clients skew toward high leverage and short holding periods will report a worse figure than one with a more conservative client base. The spread between 68% and 79.6% above is partly client mix, not purely a comment on the broker.
It says nothing about you specifically. Which is the only part you can do anything about.
So what separates the minority?
I've been trading FX for seven years and I'm not going to pretend there's a single answer. But there is one thing every profitable trader I know has in common, and it is unglamorous: they can tell you, from records, what their edge actually is. Not what it feels like. What it is.
Most people cannot. They remember the trade that ran 4R and forget the four that scratched. They know they "overtrade on Fridays" as a vague suspicion rather than a number. They have no idea what their break-even rate is, so they cannot tell a bad system from a bad week.
That gap — between what a trader believes about themselves and what their record shows — is the thing worth closing first. Not because journalling is virtuous, but because you cannot improve a process you haven't measured. If you are in the 68–79.6%, the first useful question isn't "which strategy should I switch to". It's "which of my own rules do I actually break, and what does it cost me?"
A fair warning about this article.
I build a trading journal, so I have an obvious interest in telling you to keep one. Treat the argument above with that in mind — and note that a spreadsheet does the same job. What matters is that the record exists and that you read it, not whose software it lives in.
Where to start if the number worries you
- Log every trade for one month, including the ones you skipped. The trades you didn't take are usually where the pattern hides — that's why we track them.
- Work out your break-even win rate before judging your results. At 2R a 33% win rate is fine; at 1R it's a slow bleed.
- Size properly. Most of the accounts in that 79.6% weren't wrong about direction often enough to explain it. They were too big when they were wrong. Our free position size calculator takes about ten seconds and needs no account.
- Read what max drawdown really costs you — lose 50% and you need 100% just to get back to level.
The honest summary
Can you make money trading forex? Yes. Do most people? No — and the brokers have to print that on their own front pages. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The useful move isn't to be discouraged by the number or to assume you're the exception. It's to build a record good enough that, in twelve months, you can say which one you are.
All five figures were read directly from each broker's own website on 10 September 2026 and are quoted as displayed. Brokers update these periodically, so check the current disclosure on their site before relying on it. Nothing here is financial advice.