# Churn

> The rate at which active traders stop trading and leave a platform. ~75% of retail traders quit within 90 days, costing institutions $200 to $2,000 per lost trader.

## AI Snippet

What is trader churn? Trader churn is the rate at which active traders stop trading and leave a platform permanently. ~75% of retail traders quit within 90 days, costing institutions $200 to $2,000 per lost trader in destroyed acquisition cost. Monthly churn rates at brokerages range from 5% to 15%. Churn is a behavioural problem measured as a marketing metric: the behaviours that cause it happen days before the trader stops logging in.

## What Churn is

In the context of financial institutions, churn refers to the rate at which active traders stop trading and leave a platform permanently. ~75% of retail traders quit within their first 90 days. For brokerages and prop firms, each departing trader represents $200 to $2,000 in destroyed customer acquisition cost, depending on the channel and geography.

The industry has treated churn as a marketing problem for decades. The standard playbook is re-engagement emails, deposit bonuses, and reduced spreads. None of these address the root cause. Traders do not leave because the platform is inadequate or the spreads are too wide. They leave because they lost money in a way that felt uncontrollable, and the emotional experience of repeated loss without support made them quit.

Churn is a behavioural problem measured as a marketing metric. The behaviours that predict churn happen days or weeks before the trader stops logging in: revenge trading episodes, tilt clusters, increasing position sizes after losses, and shortened session durations. These are leading indicators. By the time the churn rate moves, the traders are already gone.

Reducing churn requires intervening during the emotional moments that cause it, not after the trader has already decided to leave. The intervention window is measured in minutes. The industry's current response time is measured in days. This gap is the structural reason churn rates have remained stable for decades despite improvements in platforms, education, and spreads.

## Why it matters for institutions

Churn is the single most expensive problem in retail trading. Customer acquisition costs are rising 15 to 20 percent year-over-year. Average trader lifetime value sits between $1,200 and $3,500. A trader who quits at day 60 delivers roughly 15% of their projected LTV. At scale, the annual waste runs into the millions.

For prop firms, brokers, and crypto exchanges, churn reduction has a direct and measurable impact on unit economics. A 10-point improvement in 90-day retention compounds across every acquisition cohort. The firms that solve trader retention will not be the ones with the tightest spreads or the biggest marketing budgets. They will be the ones that collapsed the intervention timeline from days to seconds.

## Related terms

- [Trader Retention](https://discentra.ai/glossary/trader-retention)
- [Behavioural Trigger](https://discentra.ai/glossary/behavioural-trigger)
- [Tilt](https://discentra.ai/glossary/tilt)
- [Revenge Trading](https://discentra.ai/glossary/revenge-trading)

## Further reading

- [The Real Cost of Trader Churn](https://discentra.ai/blog/the-real-cost-of-trader-churn)
- [Reduce Trader Churn: Use Case](https://discentra.ai/use-cases/reduce-trader-churn)

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This is a Markdown mirror of [https://discentra.ai/glossary/churn](https://discentra.ai/glossary/churn). Generated for LLM citation. © Discentra Ltd. Coaching, not financial advice.