How much do the best traders earn — Soros versus real retail data

On 16 September 1992, a day remembered in the UK as Black Wednesday, George Soros — running the Quantum Fund — made roughly one billion US dollars on a single trading day, betting against the British pound as the Bank of England was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. On the other side of that same story sits the European Securities and Markets Authority data from 2018 to 2024: between 74 and 89 percent of retail CFD accounts in the European Union lose money on currency pairs. This article puts both extremes side by side — a few of the loudest names in macro hedge funds and the hard numbers about what a retail trader can realistically earn from home.

Soros, Druckenmiller and a one-day billion-dollar trade

The most frequently cited single FX trade in history is that short on the British pound in September 1992. Sterling was pegged to the German mark inside the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, but UK inflation, a domestic recession and high interest rates were making the defence of the peg increasingly expensive. Soros, Stanley Druckenmiller and the Quantum Fund team built a short position estimated in the contemporary press at roughly ten billion US dollars. When the Bank of England suspended the sterling defence on 16 September and the UK left the ERM, Quantum made approximately one billion dollars in a single day, and over the following weeks the nominal profit on the full operation was estimated at close to two billion.

To grasp what this trade really was, you have to view it through the lens of fund size and the macro team's months on the idea — not as a single retail-style punt. The timing and sizing are now treated in academic studies as a textbook example of extreme macro fundamental analysis. It was a duel with a central bank, not with another retail trader.

Druckenmiller, Jones and the billionaire club years later

Stanley Druckenmiller, the operational mind behind Soros Fund Management from 1988 to 2000, eventually joined the billionaires club himself — Forbes in 2024 estimates his net worth at over six billion dollars, earned mainly through three decades of running the Duquesne fund (closed to outside money in 2010) and his family office. In interviews between 2015 and 2023 he repeatedly referenced an average annual return of around thirty percent over three decades with no losing year — a hard reference for what is achievable at the very top.

The second household name in macro currency speculation is Paul Tudor Jones, founder of Tudor Investment Corporation. During the October 1987 crash known as Black Monday, his fund posted an estimated one-hundred-percent annual return on short index positions and the dollar-yen correlation. Bridgewater Associates, founded by Ray Dalio, focused mainly on bonds and equities but at its peak managed roughly 150 billion dollars (per Pensions & Investments 2022) — a scale at which a few basis points of annual return becomes hundreds of millions in management fees.

Renaissance Technologies — averaging 39 percent annually, but closed

The most durable evidence that a consistent edge on financial markets really exists is the Medallion fund operated by Renaissance Technologies, founded by mathematician Jim Simons. According to Greg Zuckerman's 2019 book The Man Who Solved the Market, between 1988 and 2018 Medallion delivered an average annual return of approximately 39 percent after fees — or closer to 66 percent before fees. No other known hedge fund of comparable size has matched that over the same period.

The context most popular accounts skip is essential. First, Medallion has been closed to outside capital since the late 1990s — only Renaissance Technologies employees and people closely connected to the firm trade it. Second, internal fees charged to those employees are unusually steep (a 5 percent management fee and a 44 percent performance fee), so the net return for an outside investor would not look like the headline figures. Third, the funds Renaissance Technologies offers to outside clients beyond Medallion have delivered much more modest results — in the low double digits annually. These returns exist, but they are essentially not for sale.

"Reflexivity sets up the boom-bust process which is one of the principal features of financial markets. Pricing reflects the underlying reality but it is also able to affect it." — George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, John Wiley & Sons, 1987.

ESMA statistics — what an average retail account really looks like

On the other end of the scale sits the retail trader in the European Union. In 2018 the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) required brokers offering leveraged CFDs to display a standardised statement on the percentage of retail accounts losing money over the prior twelve months — hard KNF data on how many traders actually make money on forex are examined separately. The numbers published since then sit consistently between 74 and 89 percent in loss, depending on the broker and quarter. These are CFD figures across different underlyings — currencies, indexes, equities — and for currency pairs specifically the percentage tends to sit at the upper end of that band. The full mechanics of the 2018 ESMA product intervention are covered in our piece on forex regulations on forexmechanics.com.

The Polish regulator, the Komisja Nadzoru Finansowego (KNF), has published its own analysis of retail accounts at domestic brokers since 2018. Recent KNF surveys, including data from 2022 and 2023, show that over a three-year horizon the share of accounts profitable through the full cycle sits in the low to mid teens of a percent, and the median outcome is negative. These numbers align with the ESMA data and leave little room for romantic thinking about quick wealth from foreign exchange.

The retail top decile — what the numbers actually look like

Combine the KNF data, the annual reports of regulated Polish brokers and the public statistics from major prop-trading firms (FTMO, The Funded Trader, MyForexFunds before its 2023 collapse), and a fairly consistent picture of the top decile — the best ten percent of retail clients — emerges. The average annual return in that group lands between 15 and 25 percent on invested capital, but the path is rarely linear. For the same group, mid-year drawdowns of 30, 40 or even 50 percent from peak equity are not unusual.

Put plainly: a good year for a top-decile retail trader looks like plus 25 percent, with stretches during which the account was 30 percent below the prior peak. That is a very different quality of return from the "stable 25 percent a year" sold in trading courses, and the non-linearity is what tests the trader's psychology more than anything. Most traders who lose are not losing because they misread charts; they lose because they cannot sit through a drawdown and break their own rules, and that is where the account bleeds out. This is why principles such as process over outcome are not empty slogans — over a three-year horizon they decide who stays in the game.

Why comparing yourself to Soros is a psychological trap

I have spent close to two decades in the markets, have been running MyBank.pl since 2004 and analysing the foreign exchange market since 2007. In conversations with students I see one recurring mistake: a beginner compares their result to a legend — Soros, Druckenmiller, Simons. Methodologically that comparison does not hold. Soros operated with billions of dollars and interbank access, Renaissance Technologies employs over two hundred maths and physics PhDs with the fastest infrastructure in the business, and the famous returns belong to just a few dozen names in history — a clean case of survivorship bias, because we never see the thousands of managers who disappeared after one bad year. The realistic benchmark is not "what did Soros make" but the 15 to 25 percent annually with sizeable drawdowns from the top decile — and that figure is not a disappointment, it is the starting point for an honest conversation about capital and goals.

Can you actually live off retail trading

The question I receive most often is whether you can live off retail trading from a home office. Theoretically yes, but it requires a rare combination of three conditions: meaningful capital (to draw a median local salary from a 20 percent annual return you need several hundred thousand euros of working capital, leverage aside), several years of documented equity-curve history, and the kind of risk discipline that the non-linear return profile destroys in most accounts. A fuller treatment is in our piece on whether you can live off forex — the conclusion is the same, a real path but a rare one.

For most readers, the more sensible route is to treat trading as a multi-year project alongside salaried work, with capital whose loss does not change life quality and goals stretched across a decade. At that horizon, the compounding effect does the heavy lifting. The alternative for traders who want scale without their own capital sits with prop-trading firms such as FTMO — but that is a separate game with its own pass-rate statistics, every bit as harsh as the ESMA numbers.

A realistic perspective for retail — what to do next

1. Open a spreadsheet and compute your real benchmark. Enter the capital you are actually ready to put at risk in trading (not your entire savings — only the portion whose loss does not change your life within six months) and multiply by 15 to 25 percent. That is your realistic, optimistic top-decile retail scenario for an annual profit — and that is what you should compare your results to, not to Soros.
2. Read the last four quarterly ESMA disclosures at your broker. Every EU-regulated broker is required to publish, on its home page, the percentage of retail clients losing money. Write down the last four values in one place — that is the only hard number about the real market you have on hand, and the four-quarter average is a better proxy for risk than any marketing slogan.
3. Plan a three-year test, not a three-month one. Setting a goal of "profitable this quarter" is the surest way to be pushed out of the market. Set a three-year horizon and measure only one thing: whether your equity curve, net of costs and drawdowns, is tilted upward. If it is, you can start thinking about scaling — for example through a funded-trader model at a credible prop firm.
4. Write one sentence about what you will not do. Briefly, on a sticky note above the monitor: I do not increase position size after a loss, I do not exceed planned risk, I do not compare myself to Soros. Those three sentences protect the account better than any technical indicator — and comparing yourself to Soros is the spark that usually starts the disaster.