15 years in trading: the truth about why 90% of traders lose money | Roman Garanin
No Bullsh!t, October 8, 2025, 76 min, 1,274 views. Roman Garanin, founder and CEO of a financial technology company and founder of a dealers community, has fifteen years in retail trading: he started as a consultant at a broker in 2010, spent around eight years writing risk management and trading engine logic for financial companies, tried to build a crypto neobank, and after 2022 built his current consulting and technology business for brokers, crypto exchanges and proprietary trading firms from scratch.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 76 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,274 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
Roman describes how the industry changed over fifteen years: from the golden era of foreign exchange brokers, through hard European regulation, to the explosive growth of proprietary trading firms with their internal conflict of interest, and on to a new generation of transparent trader competition projects. They also discuss gamification in financial products and the steady casualisation of trading.
Key ideas
- The proprietary trading industry grew from around 20 known companies in 2021 and 2022 to more than 250 now, but many such firms rest on a conflict of interest between the company and the trader.
- Gamifying a broker's funnel, with transparent probabilities and the best prize given for completing verification and the first deposit, lifted deposits and turnover several times over in one case.
- A growing segment of trading instruments is generated from random numbers and tied to no real asset, which is effectively a casino inside a trading interface.
- The large exchanges remain very inconvenient for new users, and the trend of the last ten years has been a steady simplification of the entry path.
- AI in the company's own trading platform works only as an assistant: it analyses the trader's behaviour, drawdowns, cost of earning a dollar and trade frequency, and highlights the patterns.
- The practical conclusion for anyone building a business around trading: the end point is not living off a percentage of the market on a beach, that is usually how introducers live.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript