Proptrading - Alternative für private Händler?

For a few years now, some companies, mainly from the USA and Canada, have been making a splash among traders. Proprietary trading firms no longer offer their services only locally and on site, but increasingly acquire traders from all over the world who work for the company via remote connection.

TopStepTrader from Chicago is one of the pioneers and meanwhile the most professionally positioned. These companies often recruit their traders from trader communities and coaching services or various social media groups.

Here in Germany, the topic of remote proptrading has become interesting for some private traders due to the changed tax regulations for futures transactions from 2021. At first glance, especially for young, undercapitalized and still inexperienced traders, the various offers from TopStepTrader, OneUp or LMI seem attractive.

You will lose !

A few figures in advance to back up the headline:

The fact is, the business models live primarily from the subscriptions of the customers, that's why they also sprout like mushrooms from the ground. If the CFD statistics for years, and consistently ! says that about 80-90% of customers lose, then it is no different with the propane providers. The 10% that are successful do so for maybe 1 year, if any of those are still successful then maybe 2-3% of the original 100% remain. If you consider how many thousands go through the challenges, you can calculate what comes together.

It is no different with futures traders. If 2% of 100% are consistently profitable and successful after 2 years, then this is not the exception, but the rule. Several studies all come to the same conclusion. Representative is a study from Taiwan (The cross-section of speculator skill: Evidence from day trading) is mentioned:

We document economically large cross-sectional differences in pre- and post-fee returns earned by speculative traders by analyzing daytraders in Taiwan from 1992 to 2006. We sort daytraders based on their returns in year y and analyze their performance in year y+1; the top 500 daytraders earn daily before-fee (after-fee) returns of 61.3 (37.9) basis points per day; the last-ranked daytraders earn daily before-fee (after-fee) returns of -11.5 (-28.9) basis points per day. Less than 1% of the daytrader population is able to predictably and reliably generate positive abnormal after-fee returns.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The last sentence is actually the quintessence and it is resilient, for many years and for all continents.

So if you haven't lost the desire yet, thenmaybe the offer here can give yousome clarity and a small overview.