I happened to stumble across a piece of information that I did not know existed. Apparently, the CFTC has a requirement that Brokers contain data for the amount of accounts they have by quarter for the past year. Additionally they must include the percentage of these accounts that are profitable and the ones which aren't. Since I am looking for a broker I did some digging and came up with the following, that's the variety of accounts by quarter. I was going to include the % profitable versus non-profitable, but after searching through a few the numbers were all about the same. That's the% profitable is generally 25% to 35% and the percent unprofitable is 65% to 75 percent.
People are not too encouraging statistics, but then neither is that the lottery and people still play that.
Any way this is the data I collected, and, incidentally, it's normally in the Risk Disclosure Agreement. Easy to find. Alpari did not have data for the current quarter.