Option Trading Success Rate: What “Success” Really Looks Like (With Real Data)

Intro

When people ask about option trading success rate, they usually mean “what percentage of options traders actually make money.” The answer depends on your definition of success: profitable trades, profitable months, or profitable traders after costs. Most retail options activity is short-dated and purchase-heavy, which makes the math brutal once spreads and fees show up. Research on retail option trades finds small negative average returns per trade overall, with option buying doing worse than option selling.

Tables + Analysis

Table 1: Three ways to measure option trading success rate

Key point: A “success rate” without a time window and cost treatment is basically marketing. If you want something decision-useful, use “% of traders profitable after transaction costs over 12 months.”

This is similar to how we analyze what percent of retail investors beat the S&P 500 — the definition of “success” dramatically changes the numbers.

Table 2: Retail options profitability rate (India, regulator study)

Source: SEBI study summarized in major press and Reuters coverage.

What this tells you: In a large, real-world retail sample, the “success rate” for being net profitable is single digits across a multi-year window, and options trading is the biggest loss bucket in the cited breakdown.
This does not mean options are “always bad.” It means most people approach them in ways that do not survive costs, leverage, and short holding periods.

Table 3: Why trade win rate is not the same as profitability (U.S. retail trade-level evidence)

Source: trader-level study of modern retail option trading using a verified trade-journal dataset (2020–2022).

How to use it: If the average trade return is negative, a “high win rate” is not enough. You need payoff asymmetry that beats spreads and losses when you are wrong. This also shows why strategy type matters. Selling options and buying options are not the same game.

Table 4: 0DTE is a different beast (retail losses and what drives them)

Source: conference paper on retail 0DTE option trading losses and transaction-cost contribution.

Takeaway: If your options activity is mostly 0DTE buying, your success rate is fighting a structural headwind: variance risk premium, spread, and rapid decay. The math can be survivable, but you need unusually tight execution and risk control.

For context on how retail investors perform more broadly, see our analysis of retail investor participation by country, which shows how participation rates vary globally.

Conclusion / Callout

So what is the option trading success rate? If you define success as “net profitable after costs,” large-scale regulator evidence from India shows it can be single digits over multi-year windows, and options traders are overwhelmingly net losing in the cited year breakdown. U.S. trader-level research helps explain why: average option trades are slightly negative, option buying is meaningfully negative, and 0DTE concentrates losses.