Your Favorite Social Media Trader Is Probably Down 80%
It's all for clickbait
We live in the golden age of market clickbait.
Everywhere you scroll, someone’s posting a chart with “🚀” emojis, claiming to have doubled their account last week.
But Almost every one of those traders will give it all back. The people posting these are often those whose behaviour is least aligned with long-term survival.
Social Media Algorithms Don’t Reward The Profitable
Social media platforms are designed to optimize engagement rather than profitability.
That’s why your feed is full of “massive gains” and “I told you so” moments, never the quiet discipline of risk management or proper sizing.
More measured content, such as discussions of risk management, position sizing, or volatility-adjusted returns, rarely gains comparable traction.
FOMO is a survival instinct, but investing is the wrong environment for it.
You see others making money, and your brain mistakes excitement for truth.
So you chase the same moves, often at the very moment the pros are quietly selling into that excitement.
This is why the majority of retail gains are temporary.
80-90% of Retail Traders Fail Within the First 6 Months
A trader who risks 20% of their capital per trade only needs a few wrong turns to blow up completely.
Even with great timing, most retail strategies have negative expectancy once you backtest it across hundreds of similar trades.
CI Volatility’s Perspective
CI Volatility views the social-media-driven trading environment as a predictable generator of short-lived momentum bursts followed by mean reversion.
Emotional retail participation is not a signal of trading expertise but a repeatable component of market behavior that contributes to the volatility patterns our models are designed to exploit.