How much can you make day trading: the one large study that followed everybody found 1.1% above minimum wage
Most answers to this question come from people selling something. The largest published study tracked every individual who started day trading in a national futures market over three years, and the numbers it reports are not close to the ones in the adverts.
The honest answer to this question is a distribution, not a figure, and almost nobody publishes the distribution because almost everybody answering has a course or a platform to sell.
One group did publish it. Fernando Chague, Rodrigo De-Losso and Bruno Giovannetti obtained regulator data covering every individual who began day trading in the Brazilian equity futures market between 2013 and 2015, then followed each of them. Their conclusion, in the paper’s own words, is that it is
virtually impossible for individuals to day trade for a living
The numbers behind that sentence
Of everyone who persisted for more than 300 days, meaning the people who took it seriously rather than tried it once:
97% lost money.
1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage.
0.5% earned more than a bank teller’s starting salary, and the authors add that even those did it while carrying great risk.
Brazil is not the United States and futures are not equities, so the exact percentages travel imperfectly. What travels is the shape, and the reason it travels is in how the study was built.
Why other studies report friendlier numbers
The same paper explains the discrepancy, and the explanation is more useful than the headline. Earlier academic work by Linnainmaa, by Jordan and Diltz, by Choe and Eom, and by others found that more than 20% of individuals profit. Those studies did not separate someone who placed a single day trade from someone who day trades regularly.
The odds at a roulette wheel fall the longer you play. Day trading behaves the same way, and that is precisely what the 300-day filter isolates. A 20% success rate measured across people who mostly tried it once is a different statistic from a 3% success rate among people who kept going, and only the second one answers the question anybody is actually asking.
The brokers publish their own version of this
Firms selling contracts for difference under UK and EU rules must display the share of their own retail accounts that lose money. We read three of them on 14 August 2026, from each firm’s own site:
| Provider | Retail accounts losing money |
|---|---|
| Capital.com | 79.75% |
| XTB | 74% |
| IG (UK) | 69% |
These cover CFD trading rather than futures day trading, and they count all retail accounts rather than persistent traders. They are also each firm’s self-reported rolling figure, not an independent audit. Taken for what they are, they point the same direction as the Brazilian data from an entirely separate source: the majority loses, and the firms have to say so in their own marketing.
The prop firm route does not change the arithmetic
The pitch that answers this question with a bigger number is usually a funded account, where someone else’s capital is supposed to remove the constraint. We looked at what those accounts actually are in funded account trading, and at the only two firms publishing their pass rates in prop firm pass rates.
MyFundedFutures discloses that 1.01% of participants reach live capital. That is a different measurement of a different population, and it lands within rounding distance of the 1.1% in the Brazilian study. Two unrelated datasets converging on roughly one in a hundred is worth more attention than either one alone.
So what is the realistic answer
For most people who try it, negative. For most people who stick with it, still negative. The small group that earns a living from it exists, is real, and is roughly one percent of those who persist, which means planning around being in it is planning around an outcome you cannot control.
That does not make day trading pointless, and we are not in the business of telling anyone what to do with their money. It makes the framing wrong. Treating it as a career path with an expected salary produces bad decisions about position size, about how much capital to commit, and about when to stop; treating it as a low-probability activity with a capped downside produces sane ones.
What to do with this before you fund anything
Decide the number you would need per month, then look at where it sits. If it is a salary replacement, the honest odds are in the chart above, and no course changes them.
Ask any firm quoting a success rate where the number comes from. Almost none publish one. The two that do are named on our pass rates page, and the absence elsewhere is itself information.
Count your costs before your returns. Commission on a per-side basis compounds fast at volume, as the break-even arithmetic in NinjaTrader’s fees shows, and costs are the one part of the outcome that is fully knowable in advance.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
We read the Chague, De-Losso and Giovannetti paper directly and took the figures from its abstract. We read the three risk warnings on the providers’ own sites on 14 August 2026. We have not run a study, surveyed traders, or traded any of these accounts.
Nothing here forecasts what any individual will earn. It describes what happened to a large group of people whose results somebody bothered to count.
Sources
- Chague, De-Losso & Giovannetti — Day trading for a living? (13 June 2020)
- Capital.com — published risk warning
- XTB — published risk warning
- IG — published risk warning