Last week fxstreet's annual demo trading contest was concluded and the results are striking, though not surprising: almost everybody lost money. And a lot of it too.
- 56 contestants have won $4,728,093.32, which represents a +168.86% return over their initial capital.
- 498 contestants have lost $21,553,294.38, that is, they have lost 86.6% of their initial capital.
Basically this means the following: 89.8% have lost money which represents 86.6% of their starting capital. That is, they were wiped out. Remaining 10.2% have won over $4.7 million meaning that the broker potentially won over $16.8 million by doing nothing but waiting for traders to lose their money.
Why I say that? Simply because it's demo and the brokers don't mess around with winning accounts on demo accounts for several reasons. Were that a live trading contest the result would be similar on the losing side but completely different on the winning side - 56 traders would never ever win $4.7 million because someone would have 'helped' them to lose their money.
This also goes to show you that indeed over 90% of traders lose money over very short period of time however a very small part of the traders can actually make money and a lot of it. It only took 90% of traders 2 months to lose 90% of their capital. It's remarkable how this little experiment proved the industry known statistics which no one is keen on publishing.
I'm all eager to see the results of the LIVE contest which kicked off a week ago. I have a feeling results would be a little different ;)
