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How many traders have actually succeeded trading forex? Is it all just a dream?

About 6-8months back, I had the idea to diversify income streams within the trading niche itself and I started learning more about the industry. When I say learning more about the industry, I mean by actually talking to people within the space, traders, brokers, prop firm employees. So I’m speaking to this mid level sales manager for a well reputed large forex brokerage regarding affiliate commissions for referring traders to them. We hopped on a zoom call and discussed various avenues to generate business. Unbeknownst to him, I have been a trader for 12years now and know almost everything about how LPs ( liquidity providers ) work, how orders are executed, broker servers and technology infrastructure, third party trading platforms such as MT5, deals between brokers and LPs and Metatrader. Naturally, I knew about A-Book and B-Book and somehow the process of booking trades came up during our conversation. He hesitated at first to discuss B-Books further but I suppose we had developed a little bit of rapport within those 10minutes and what he revealed to me I suppose I knew already on some level but hearing it straight from the horses mouth just changed how I viewed forex brokerages altogether and just how profitable they are.Let’s get to the numbers. 90% of traders lose their complete or partial deposit over the course of a year! That would lead you to believe that 10% actually make money but that is where you’d be wrong! You see we are not talking about a years worth of numbers over here. Whenever you read a forex brokers disclaimer at the bottom which would say something along the lines of trading forex or financial instruments is risky and 78.6% ( or some similar figure ) of investors lose money, that is a misleading statement. All licensed forex brokers are bound by regulation based on their jurisdiction to display such disclaimers to warn investors but here’s the trick, these numbers just take into account a years worth of numbers! When you look long term, and this was told to me by this manager, no trader ever makes money long term and all traders end up losing money over the long term such as 5years! I had always been under the impression that since brokers maintain 2 books, the A-Book and the B-Book, there is a sorting in place and losing traders are placed on the B-Book and winning traders on the A-Book. ( For people not familiar with the A-Book, B-Book procedure, A-Book essentially means when a broker receives an order from a trader on their platform, they charge their spread or commission and forward the traders order to the LP ( liquidity provider ). Liquidity Providers are at the backend of brokerages and aggregate volumes from pools of liquidity from major banks, financial firms and miscellaneous other liquidity venues. A broker simply is displaying the quotes provided by the LP with their own markup on spread + commission. Consider LPs to be like the wholesalers in any business providing quotes to brokers at a wholesale price and brokers add their margin. B-Booking a trade means that this order is not forwarded to the liquidity provider and instead booked by the broker and the broker is on the other end of the trade that you have taken. If you have ever heard or read about B-Books, you must’ve come across how its a direct conflict of interest between the trader and the broker when broker is on the opposite end of your trade! You losing 100$ is the broker gaining 100$ and the broker has a built in edge ( spread + commission ). How this whole industry works is quite simple, all of your losses are the brokers gain! If you lose 5000$ trading, 5000$ is the gross profit of the broker from your trades and if you do make a profit, the broker just needs to ensure enough cashflow to outlast the swings in equity that come from your trading over the long term. The more trades you take, the less are your odds of making money as the odds reduce over a large number of trades and a trading edge can disappear over time. So a trader that is up 200% over a year will be down 60% the next year or just dilly dally in the same spot until he gets fed up, life catches on, a lot of things are happening within our lives and most people react the same way when emotional. How can you not get emotional if your dream of traveling and freedom gets shattered? Bottomline is, like every industry out there in the world, money is moving from smaller traders to larger traders ( humongous giant behemoth brokerage houses with revenues of a few hundred million dollars ! ) Brokerage houses are the best traders out there, there’s a built in trading edge ( spreads + commissions ) plus trading data from traders out there playing the game of odds. Your broker is Caeser’s Palace and you are the degenerate gambler learning lessons from the market. I also managed to get in touch with traders who have won Forex Trading Worldcup or have ranked amongst the top in these championships. Almost all of these traders are using an EA to trade algorithmically to generate impressive returns of 500% in a year but when you really look at their trading records you realise that they are participating in these championships with funds that are really not that sizeable. Allocating 10,000$ or a similar amount to trade with and making 500% over the course of a year is quite different to taking let’s say, 5million dollars and generating 500% on that. At the end of the day, 10,000$ to most of these traders is not a big sum to lose for the amount of marketing and exposure they would receive by being at the top of these rankings and almost all of them have their own websites selling their own EAs and that is their main source of income, their bread and butter. One of these traders that I talked to was severely disgruntled with the forex industry and its practices and he told me that he exclusively just trades currency futures now instead of spot forex via a forex broker. The idea being that futures are traded through an exchange and that order is indeed matched and there’s somebody on the other side of that trade. Makes sense right? But here’s the thing, I do not agree with him regarding this assessment. Makes perfect sense on the face of it but when you really look at it you realise it’s all the same game. It’s just that the procedure has changed. While a forex broker will outright B-Book your trades, an exchange has all this data coming to it from brokers and institutions. Brokerages that are forwarding your trades to the exchange are also doing something else, they are providing a data feed and selling your trades ( trading data ) to a hedge fund or some financial institution to profit off of it. That is how discount brokerages are able to keep their spreads and commission so low! How else will they pay their individual employees packages of 100,000$ plus benefits? This is exactly how Robinhood makes their money! In conclusion, the best way to trade is by trading against people! The second best way to trade is to spend years on a steep learning curve and becoming the best version of yourself by practicing your art and finding and maintaining an edge with consistency.