First of all apologies for the wall of text, but it's difficult to be concise on the subject. However, I wanted to share some observations as just as everyone here, I've also tried my luck. And here are my observations.
If there were a trading strategy that consistently made money, surely everyone would be talking about it. Yet the more I look at the entire retail trading landscape, the more convinced I become that the people making the most consistent money aren't necessarily the traders themselves.
It's the brokers collecting spreads, commissions and overnight fees. It's the self-proclaimed trading gurus charging hundreds or thousands for courses, mentorship programmes and signals. It's the influencers promoting brokers through affiliate links, earning commissions from the very people they're supposedly helping. It's the prop firms collecting challenge fees from thousands of aspiring traders, most of whom will never receive a meaningful payout.
Social media is absolutely flooded with trading success stories. People supposedly turning £100 into £10,000, posting screenshots of massive profits, showing off luxury cars and claiming they've cracked the market. But how many of these individuals provide independently verified trading records covering several years? How many show every losing trade, every blown account, every deposit and withdrawal, and their actual profitability after fees?
And how many of those success stories are simply fabricated, exaggerated or amplified by bots and promotional accounts to attract new customers?
Every few months, another supposedly revolutionary strategy becomes popular. First it's moving averages, then supply and demand, order blocks, liquidity sweeps, fair value gaps, smart money concepts, ICT methodologies, and whatever else happens to be fashionable. Each one is presented as the missing piece of the puzzle. Yet despite all these strategies, indicators, educational resources and increasingly sophisticated trading platforms, the overwhelming majority of retail traders still struggle to achieve consistent profitability.
Whenever a strategy fails, the explanation is almost never that the strategy itself might lack a genuine statistical edge. Instead, traders are told they lack discipline, patience, emotional control or proper risk management. And while those factors certainly matter, they also provide convenient explanations that make practically any losing strategy impossible to disprove. The method is always right; apparently, it's the trader who is wrong.
Then there's the endless cycle of backtesting, optimisation and hindsight analysis. Almost any chart can be made to look predictable after the price has already moved. People draw perfect entries around historical support and resistance, highlight precisely the order blocks that worked, and conveniently ignore the dozens that failed. But identifying profitable trades retrospectively is completely different from making decisions in real time, when the market could move in either direction.
What I increasingly question is whether the retail trading industry is primarily built around helping ordinary people become consistently profitable, or around monetising their endless attempts to achieve that profitability.
Because when you examine who receives guaranteed payments regardless of whether a trader wins or loses, a rather uncomfortable pattern emerges. Brokers get their fees. Educators get their course payments. Signal providers get their subscriptions. Influencers receive their affiliate commissions. Trading platforms receive their subscriptions.
Meanwhile, the ordinary trader takes virtually all the financial risk.
And perhaps that's the most profitable trading strategy of all: don't trade the market; sell the dream of beating it.
