Survivorship Bias: You Only See the Winners on Twitter

Listen. I’m going to tell you something that’ll sting worse than a flash crash during your morning coffee.

Every single profitable trader you see posting screenshots of their six-figure monthly returns? They’re not there because they’re special. They’re there because they survived. And for every one of them flexing on Twitter, there are roughly 47 other traders whose accounts got absolutely annihilated—quietly, with no fanfare, no tearful goodbye post. Just silence.

That’s survivorship bias. And it’s the most insidious, invisible force destroying retail trading accounts today.

The Graveyard Nobody Talks About

Let me paint you a picture from my early days in Canary Wharf. 2008. I watched brilliant traders—I mean genuinely sharp blokes—get wiped out. Completely. Years of capital, gone in a matter of weeks. You know what happened to their social media presence? It evaporated. Their Twitter accounts went dormant. Their Medium articles disappeared. Their YouTube channel stopped uploading.

But the ones who happened to be long GBP/USD when the Bank of England intervened? They’re still tweeting about it in 2024.

That’s survivorship bias in its most distilled form: You only see the winners because the losers don’t advertise their failure.

The mathematics of this should make your brain itch. If you start with 1,000 retail forex traders, and half of them blow their accounts in the first year, you’re left with 500. Of those 500, 90% will never post their results publicly. They’ll fade into obscurity, nursing their losses, moving on with their lives.

But the 50 traders who actually made money? You bet your arse they’re posting about it. Some are posting daily. Screenshots, equity curves, “room for 3 more mentees at £299/month.” The full circus.

So what do you see on Twitter’s trading ecosystem? A carefully curated highlight reel of success, with absolutely zero context about the impossible odds.

The Illusion of Skill vs. The Reality of Luck

Here’s where it gets properly dark.

A trader makes £50,000 on a GBP/USD trade. Fantastic result. They post it everywhere. LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube thumbnail. “SIMPLE STRATEGY THAT MADE ME 50K!” Boom. Now they’ve got 3,000 followers.

But what you don’t see is the preceding six months where they lost £35,000 on similar setups that didn’t work. You don’t see the 47 other traders who used the exact same strategy and got demolished. You only see the one who caught the market at precisely the right moment—a feat that required luck, regardless of how much skill they possessed.

This is absolutely critical: A profitable trade tells you nothing about trading skill. It tells you about variance.

Over small sample sizes, luck and skill are indistinguishable. A monkey throwing darts at a board will occasionally hit the bullseye. If that monkey posts a photo of that one bullseye on Twitter and ignores the 1,000 misses, you’d think the monkey was a dart champion.

Yet retail traders fall for this constantly. They see someone’s winning trade and think: “Ah, so that’s the secret.” They buy the course. They implement the strategy. They get destroyed, because they’re not seeing the full dataset.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even If Traders Do)

Let’s talk about the actual statistics, because this is where survivorship bias becomes quantifiable.

According to research from the UK Financial Conduct Authority, approximately 72% of retail forex traders lose money. That’s not a guess. That’s a regulatory fact.

Of those 72%, the vast majority will:

• Delete their social media posts
• Stop talking about forex
• Move on to something else
• Never mention they got rekt

Of the 28% who profit, roughly 15-20% will post about it. The remaining 10-12% will stay quiet (usually because they’re professionally managed accounts or they’ve learned that bragging attracts tax inspectors).

So out of 1,000 forex traders, maybe 150 will post about their profits publicly. And of those 150, probably 20-30 will actually be consistently profitable over a 5-year period.

Which means you’re seeing roughly 3% of the total trading population when you scroll through forex Twitter.

But it feels like 50%, doesn’t it? Because the noise they generate is disproportionate to their actual numbers.

Why Your Brain Falls For This

Humans are catastrophically bad at statistics. We’re built on pattern recognition and storytelling, not data analysis.

When you see a successful trader’s post, your brain goes: “There’s a successful trader. Success is possible. I am similar to this person. Therefore, success is possible for me.”

All true statements. But critically missing: You’re not similar to the average person in that position. You’re only comparing yourself to the visible survivors.

It’s like going to a casino, seeing one bloke who won £10,000, asking him how he did it, then ignoring the 5,000 people who lost £10,000 that same night.

The Antidote

So what do you actually do about this?

First: Assume everyone on social media is lying, especially if they’re being specific. Not maliciously lying—they genuinely might not realize they’re seeing only their own winners. But the net effect is the same: you’re getting a distorted picture.

Second: Look at drawdown charts, not profit charts. Anyone can cherry-pick their best month. A proper trader shows you the brutal bits—the 30% drawdown in Q3, the six weeks they were underwater. The ones who refuse to show that? They’re either hiding something or they don’t have enough data yet.

Third: Calculate the odds. If someone is promoting a £297 course on “The One Strategy That Made Me 6 Figures,” ask yourself: if this strategy was actually that good, why would they sell it for £297 instead of trading it full-time and becoming a billionaire? The answer is because selling courses to desperate people is more profitable and requires less risk than actually trading.

Fourth: Understand base rates. 72% of traders lose money. Before you even think about a strategy, accept that you’re more likely to lose money than make it. If a strategy can’t overcome that base rate—and almost none can, because they’re all being promoted by people selected for survival bias—it’s not worth your time.

The Real Talk

I’ve been trading for 23 years. I’ve made serious money. I’ve also had periods where I was underwater for months. You know what I don’t do? Post about the winning weeks while conveniently omitting the losing ones.

The traders who’ve actually made generational wealth—the ones running proper funds, the institutional players—they don’t post on Twitter. They don’t need to. They’re too busy compounding their capital.

The ones posting constantly? They’re either early in their journey (and haven’t blown up yet), or they’ve figured out that their actual edge is marketing, not trading.

Survivorship bias is the single most dangerous psychological trap in retail trading. It’s not that you’re stupid. It’s that the environment is deliberately showing you a lie.

Don’t fall for it.

Now close Twitter and go calculate your real edge.