The Retail FX Trader: Random Trading and the Negative Sum Game

With the internet boom of early 2000 making access to trading the Foreign Exchange (FX) market far simpler for members of the general public, the growth of 'retail' FX trading continues, with daily transaction volumes as high as $200 billion. Potential new entrants to the retail FX trading world may come from the recent UK pension deregulations, further increasing the volumes. The attraction of FX trading is that it offers high returns and whilst it has been understood that it is high-risk in nature, the rewards are seen as being commensurately high for the 'skilled and knowledgeable' trader who has an edge over other market participants. This paper analyses a number of independent sources of data and previous research, to examine the profitability of the Retail FX trader and compares the results with that of a simulated random trading models. This paper finds evidence to suggest that whilst approximately 20% of traders can expect to end up with a profitable account, around 40% might expect their account to be subject to a margin call. This paper finds a strong correlation between the overall profitability of traders and impact of the cost of the bid-ask spread, whilst finding little if any evidence that retail FX traders, when viewed as a group, are achieving results better than that from random trading

The retail FX trader: rising above random

There has been much historic discussion about the effectiveness, or otherwise, of technical trading strategies in the financial markets. The view, that ‘technical analysis’ (TA) may be of limited value in a market seemingly driven by economic fundamentals, would seem to be supported by research showing that retail Foreign Exchange (FX) traders as a whole are not achieving returns above that of random trading. Despite this, technical trading strategies and the search for the ‘holy grail’ system remains ever popular with the Retail FX Trader. This paper examines three popular technical trading strategies and ‘best practices’ used by the retail FX trader, to try and identify rules and approaches that might help such a trader achieve ‘better-than-random’ trading results. Using a non-optimised, computer based trading simulation, results from over 175 million ‘random’ trades across nine years of data were evaluated to try and establish if such rules exist and to answer the question ‘can a Retail FX Trader ever expect to use technical analysis to achieve net profitable outcomes?’ The results show that the use of Technical Analysis does seem to offer better-than-random results and that setting significantly larger profit targets for trades, versus the maximum loss a trader is prepared to accept, can produce profitable trading, even when using no TA and entering trades randomly