Plus500 onboarded 104,500 new customers during 2025 and ended the year with 254,138 active ones. Both figures come out of the same set of accounts.
How long does the average retail trader last?
Not long. The academic work on retail day trading is consistent across the markets it has looked at: around 40% of people who start quit within a single month, roughly 80% are gone inside two years, and about 7% are still active after five. Those are attrition figures rather than loss figures, and they describe something different from the risk warnings.
Take the provenance seriously before leaning on them. Those percentages come from academic studies of retail day traders, not from a UK regulator, and no British dataset of the same kind is published at all. So read them as the shape of a curve rather than as a measurement of this market. The shape has held up everywhere it has been examined, and Britain has not been examined, which is a gap nobody assembling these numbers can close by assembling them more carefully.
What the curve does that a loss rate cannot is describe people over time. A loss rate tells you what share of accounts are underwater at a moment. An attrition curve tells you what became of the account holders, which is the thing anyone opening an account should actually want to know, and it is the one of the two that appears nowhere on any broker’s homepage.
Why does the industry track this so closely?
Because customer lifetime is the business. A brokerage acquires clients at a cost, earns from them while they trade, and loses them when they stop. If four in ten leave within a month, continuous and enormous acquisition spend becomes a structural feature of the model rather than a marketing choice.
The disclosures show it plainly. Plus500 reported onboarding 104,500 new customers in 2025 while holding around 254,138 active clients. A firm whose annual intake runs to roughly 41% of its active base is refilling a customer list rather than compounding one.
The filings put a figure on what one of those clients is worth, more precisely than any marketing page will. Plus500 reported average revenue per active client of USD 3,023 across its base of 254,138 active clients. Set that against an attrition curve where four in ten are gone inside a month and the economics resolve: the average client is worth enough that spending heavily to replace the ones who leave still pays comfortably.
That average is doing what averages always do, which is hiding a distribution. USD 3,023 covers the client who deposited a couple of hundred pounds, traded for three weeks and disappeared, alongside whoever has been trading daily for years. Nothing in the disclosure separates them, and no broker has any reason to publish the split. What the figure establishes is the scale of the prize per surviving customer, which is the number that makes the whole replacement machine worth running.
| Time since starting | Share still active | What the industry sees |
| Account opened | 100% | acquisition cost incurred in full, before any revenue |
| 1 month | about 60% | four in ten acquisition costs already sunk |
| 2 years | about 20% | the survivors start to matter |
| 5 years | about 7% | the long tail the acquisition spend is hunting for |
Attrition percentages from academic research on retail day traders, drawn from non-British populations. There is no published one-year figure, so the gap between the first month and the second year is deliberately left empty rather than interpolated.
Is the UK population shrinking or just churning?
Both, on the leveraged side. Investment Trends counted 167,000 active UK retail leverage traders as at May 2025, down 39% from a peak of 275,000 in 2021. Those are survey estimates rather than a count of accounts, but a contraction of more than a third in four years is far too large to be an artefact of sampling, and churn inside a stable base would not produce it.
The pandemic-era surge brought in a large cohort at an unusual moment, and most of it has since left. Meanwhile the broader, unleveraged investing population went the other way: 7.9 million UK adults were using investment platforms by 2024, up from 4.4 million in 2020. People did not stop investing. They stopped using leverage.
Does leaving mean losing?
Not necessarily, and this is where the attrition data is routinely over-read. People stop trading for all sorts of reasons: they got bored, they got busy, they decided it was not for them, they moved the money into a pension, they had a child. Quitting is not a verdict on the activity and treating every departure as a casualty overstates the case. But the direction is hard to argue with. If quitting were mostly driven by success you would expect the surviving cohort to be small and the departing cohort to be satisfied, which is not what the loss disclosures suggest. The honest summary is that most people leave, a minority of those leave having done well, and nobody publishes the split.
Where does this data come from?
Some of it from academic work on retail trading populations, some from the FCA’s own surveys, some from an independent survey house, and a surprising amount from the brokers themselves, who file detailed annual accounts and disclose client counts, per-client revenue and onboarding numbers as a matter of course. All of it is public. None of it is assembled anywhere convenient.
Which is the honest weakness of an article like this one, and of the compilation work behind it. These sources were never designed to sit next to each other. The attrition curve is academic and foreign, the per-client revenue is one listed firm’s, the leveraged-trader count is a survey estimate, and the joins between them are where the inference happens. They point the same way, which is why the picture is worth drawing, but anyone quoting a clean 80% as a settled British statistic is tidier than the evidence allows. Pulling the numbers into one place is unglamorous work, and where it has been done, as The Investors Centre has done in compiling its UK trading statistics from FCA filings and the major regulated brokers’ own annual disclosures, the result exists mainly because somebody sat down and did it rather than because the industry made it easy.
What should a new trader take from this?
Assume you are in the 80%, and design accordingly. That means not building a plan that only makes sense over a ten-year horizon, not paying for annual tooling in your first month, and not choosing a platform on features you will need in year three. It also means paying close attention to what it costs to leave, because on the numbers above you are considerably more likely to use the exit than the advanced charting.
Withdrawal fees, inactivity charges and the dormancy clock are therefore among the more consequential things a beginner can check, since they are statistically the features you are most likely to encounter. Very few sign-up comparisons frame them that way, for the obvious reason that nobody markets a product on how cheaply you can abandon it.
So put one question to any platform before you fund it, and put it in writing: what happens to this account, and to the money in it, if I stop using it for eighteen months and then come back. The answer covers the dormancy trigger, the monthly charge, the re-verification process and the withdrawal route in one go. It takes a support agent five minutes to answer and it is the single most relevant question the attrition data suggests you should be asking.