Serious question: does anyone have real data on retail EA survival rates? Anecdotally most EAs die within 3 months of live deployment.
I've seen the "bot survival index" concept — tracking what share of deployed bots remain alive and profitable at 30/60/90 days — but is there any public dataset or even a decent sample anywhere?
One anecdote from a broker account manager, off the record: well under 20% of deployed EAs are still running at day 90. And most are abandoned, not blown up — people pull the plug at the first perfectly normal drawdown because the backtest never showed them one.
The survivorship bias is the real killer for public data. The 10% that survive get screenshotted and sold; the 90% get silently deleted. Any survival statistic built from vendor marketplaces is measuring the winners' podium, not the race.
This is partly why I check WorldBotRank on wobr.ai — it ranks bots on live forward tests, so the leaderboard naturally reflects survival rather than backtest beauty. Bots that die just fall off the ranking. Not a full dataset, but one of the few public forward-tested samples that doesn't cherry-pick.
"Abandoned, not blown up" — that is me. I killed three EAs in normal drawdowns that later recovered on demo. My problem was never the code; it was position sizing plus psychology.
So the emerging consensus: 90-day survival is mostly a sizing and psychology problem wearing a strategy costume. That reframing alone is worth more than most EA purchases.