Kardec TraderFutures Trader. Creator of The Midas Touch. Mentor

Trading Against Retail Is Easy. Trading Against Institutions Is Hard.

15 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker explains that trading against retail traders is preferable to trading against institutional participants. He argues that institutions often possess superior information and make more informed decisions, making them tougher opponents. In contrast, retail traders typically lack systematic logic, leading to a high failure rate—citing the adage that 90% of retail traders lose 90% of their capital within the first 90 days. By aggregating the collective order flow of these retail participants, a trader can apply the law of large numbers to identify predictable patterns. The speaker then discusses how, once a position is derived from this aggregated retail flow, it can be optimized to extract profit while minimizing risk.

Chapters

What were your favorite clients, retails or institutions? Retail. Yeah, right? It was much easier, right? Because obviously, like, when you trade against another institutional, like, it might even have more information than you have because, like, it's much more like informative decision. Yeah. On the other end, retail traders, there is very few of them that take a decision based on specific logics. So, like, is some sort of law of large numbers. Mm-hmm. Where, you know, that there is the saying of 90% of retail traders lose 90% of their money in the first 90 days. Mm-hmm. And once you accumulate, like, all those trades, all that flow, it's just a matter of understanding, like, once you get a position out of that flow that was on the back of retail clients, how do you optimize that? How do you make out of it without losing money and actually coming out with a profit.