Head to head
Answered three times, at three capital levels, because the right answer flips with the amount.
Facts checked on October 22, 2026
Every comparison of these three markets answers by personality: forex if you love news, crypto if you are young, stocks if you are sensible. The correct answer is not a personality trait — it is a capital level. The same beginner gets three different correct answers at three different amounts of money, so here are the three answers.
None of the three, with real money. Forex's computed minimum is $1,000: at $200, one normal micro-lot trade risks about 1.5% of the account and costs eat about 10% of it a month. Day trading US stocks at $200 runs on settled cash only (the $2,000 margin floor) and its costs at day-trading frequency are about 10% of the account a month. Crypto spot's minimum is $750. At $200 the honest verdict for all three is the same: demo, journal, save — the $200 is your first capital instalment, not an account.
The answer splits. Forex clears its minimum ($1,000) — mechanically workable, with the European loss figure (74–89% of retail CFD accounts lose) as the backdrop. Crypto spot clears its minimum ($750). US day trading clears its mechanics term too — but only just, and only at a broker that has actually adopted the post-PDT intraday margin standards, which is a per-broker fact with a date on it. At this level the choice is made by your hours and your journal, not by the marketing of any of the three.
All three are mechanically workable — and the deciding factor inverts. At $20,000 the cost stack is a small percentage everywhere, unit risk is a choice rather than a constraint, and what separates the markets is the loss base rate and your temperament for each one's clock: forex and crypto trade nearly around the clock, US stocks trade a session, and the day-trading studies (about 5% profitable after costs) describe the most demanding of the three. Nobody crowns a winner at this level either: the verdict is that capital has stopped being your problem, and method — measured in a journal — is now the whole game.
A comparison that ends 'it depends on your capital, and here are the three numbers' converts nobody — which is why the personality version is the one that ranks. We take no money from brokers, so we can print the capital-conditional version.
The verdict gives you the arithmetic for your market and your capital. The Start-or-Wait Kit gives you the complete workbook: the demo-record audit (the 50-trade review grid), the staged capital plan up to your market's minimum viable capital, the 90-day learning plan week by week, and the real-cost tracker — the spreadsheet experienced traders build by hand, ready to fill in.
Included in the $39 Start-or-Wait Kit
Sources: FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-10 (April 20, 2026) and the brokers' own pages for the PDT tracker; ESMA Decision (EU) 2018/796 and the AMF restatement for European CFD loss figures; ASIC Report 828 (FY2023–24) for Australia; CFTC retail forex materials for the United States; Barber, Lee, Liu & Odean (Taiwan market data) and Chague & De Losso (Brazil) for day-trading outcomes; the FPFX Technology dataset of 300,000+ prop-firm accounts, reported by Finance Magnates (2024); broker-published minimum deposits and margin schedules as dated on the dataset page. If a figure has moved since our check date, the issuer's own publication wins — and write to help@doogex.com so we can correct ours.