How Many Retail Forex Traders Are Actually Profitable? What Regulatory Disclosures Show

Written by Greg, founder of FTMarketWatch — a former licensed commodities trader, self-directed investor since. Not a licensed financial advisor.

Citation: National Futures Association (NFA) — quarterly Forex Dealer Member profitability disclosures, required under CFTC Regulation 5.5(e). View source →

Study Overview

U.S. regulators require every registered retail forex broker (a “Forex Dealer Member,” or FDM) to publicly disclose, every quarter, what percentage of its customers' non-discretionary trading accounts were profitable versus unprofitable.

Methodology Summary

This isn't an independent academic study — it's a standing regulatory requirement. Each NFA-registered forex broker calculates and publishes its own account-level win/loss percentages every quarter, based on CFTC Regulation 5.5(e).

“Unprofitable” includes accounts that merely broke even, not just accounts that lost money outright. Figures are broker-specific rather than a single industry-wide number, so a full picture requires comparing multiple brokers' individual quarterly disclosures.

Key Findings

Sampling recent quarterly disclosures from several U.S.-regulated forex brokers through 2025 and 2026 shows profitable-account percentages typically in the roughly 27% to 41% range — meaning somewhere between roughly 6 and 7 out of every 10 active retail accounts were unprofitable in a given quarter at these brokers.
This pattern has shown up consistently, quarter after quarter, across multiple unrelated brokers, rather than being a one-time or single-broker result.

Limitations

These disclosures only cover non-discretionary retail accounts at U.S.-regulated brokers — they don't capture offshore or unregulated brokers, or discretionary (managed) accounts.
The data is a quarterly snapshot; it doesn't track the same individual trader across multiple quarters, so it can't tell us how many unique people were ever profitable versus how much churn there is between profitable and unprofitable quarters for the same accounts.
There's no single official industry-wide aggregate — the figures above reflect a sample of individual broker disclosures, not a comprehensive census of every U.S. forex broker.

Practical Meaning

Because this comes from a mandatory regulatory disclosure rather than a single study or survey, and the pattern repeats consistently across brokers and quarters, it's a reasonably strong, ongoing data point supporting the idea that most retail forex accounts, in a given quarter, do not end up profitable.