There is a piece of research that makes for very interesting reading. It was the brainchild of an analyst called David Rodriguez, and it is brilliant. Rodriguez worked for a major FX broker, and he attempted to find out why there was such a high failure rate amongst its clients trading FX. The broker has some 25,000 people who trade currencies daily. Rodriguez investigated all the trades...

Trevor Neil, a well-known figure in the trading world, once ran a hedge fund with a surprising statistic—his trading strategy had only a 25% hit rate. That means out of every 100 trades, only 25 were profitable. Yet, the fund was highly successful. Why does this matter? Because most traders assume that to be profitable, a strategy must have a win rate above 50%. Trevor’s story...

Even though your broker makes all the tools under the sun available to you, no one is immune to the statistics of the financial markets. Unless you have gone through some sort of structured training or you have been schooled by someone who is walking the path you yourself want to walk on, or you give this endeavour some serious thought, you will most likely fail in the financial markets. Look...