What is the % of successful traders within IB's?

[spreader_legger]

I read in these forums all the time of figures that suggest that 95% of all would be traders are unsuccessful. But I have never yet seen any figures relating to trainees at Investment banks? I assume that the success rate is far higher there .... which is probably a combination of candidate selection and training provided.

I know that the success rates at arcades are not that high either (I have witnessed a high turnaround of would be traders whilst working in a couple). The thing that I did notice however was that the training on offer was not much better than you could get free of charge from these forums. Many operate a sink or swim policy.

I presume IB's would do things a lot differently. Is it possible to try and replicate the type of training on offer within such institutions. Is one-to-one mentoring indispensible in improving your chances in this game?


Would be interested to hear opinions especially from those trading for banks.

 

[tar]

0007

the vast majority of our clients trade in the indices, currencies and gold and oil. Hardly sophisticated instruments! They either go up or ... they go down... 50/50.

not sure why longs are always prevelant (especially as one of the whole points of spread betting is the ease with which you can bet on the down side as easily as the up) I think that it is probably psycological people feel more comfortable receiving dividend yield than paying it out and (of course) prices do usually rally more than they fall over a complete business cycle.

we do a considerable amount of client trading analysis, in fact we asked a cambridge quant professor plus his post grad team to try to come up with a predictive 'black box' based upon the actions of our clients. The result was complete random noise with no disernable trend at all.

If you like 'chaos theory' in its purest form!

we make no bones about the fact that just under 80pc of our clients lose (in fact I lead on this at our seminars). This is not strange. slightly worse numbers lose when private clients trade using Direct Access on the various futures exchanges. (as per a report from the CME a few years ago).

simon

I know this is not what u asked 4 , but i want to quote these words from Simon Denham
he is the managing director for Capitalspreads ...