What 24,971 Trading Videos Reveal (2026)

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · Published 2026-09-23

YouTube is where most people start learning to trade, so what gets made there, and what gets watched, says a lot about what beginners are actually shown. This report measures it from one dataset rather than from impressions, and every figure below can be recomputed from the files it links.

Download the figures: all figures as JSON and the topic table as CSV. Free to reuse with attribution under the same license as the rest of the research page.

Findings you can quote

• Of 24,924 trading videos with a visible view count, 24.1% have fewer than 1,000 views and 3.2% have a million or more.
• The 249 most-viewed videos (the top 1%) hold 36.2% of the 4,061,826,125 views in the study. The top 10% hold 79.6%.
• Day trading is the most-made topic: 1,854 videos, from 826 different channels.
• Retirement accounts are the least-made topic measured and the most-watched: 60 videos, median 42,096 views.
• Risk management is made often and watched little: 845 videos, median 3,954 views, 82% under 50,000.
• Lesson-shaped titles get about twice the views: median 15,670 against 7,471 for every other title.
• Length separates videos sharply: 20 to 30 minute videos have a median of 27,867 views, 1 to 5 minute videos 1,400.
• Most channels appear once: 6,608 of 9,458 channels (69.9%) have a single video in the study.

How it works

How the videos were collected

The study ran 1,409 YouTube searches in August 2026, each a trading or investing question a beginner might type, from “what is market structure trading” to broker, tax and indicator questions. It kept every result’s title, length, view count and channel, and the search that found it. The searches returned 31,760 results. A popular video ranks for many searches, so 6,789 results (21.4%) were repeats; removing them by video ID leaves 24,971 unique videos. The file is dated 18 August 2026.

How a video is counted under a topic

A video counts under a topic when its title names the topic as a whole word or phrase, in any case, plurals included, with a space or a hyphen between words. Each topic lists its aliases in the download (for example, moving averages are “moving average”, “EMA” or “SMA”). Descriptions are never searched, because only 5,827 of the videos had description text in the results. A title can name several topics, so topic counts overlap and do not add up to 24,971.

A median is the middle video when the videos are sorted by views; with an even number of videos it is the mean of the middle two. The 47 videos with no visible count are counted as zero views, which is how every topic page on this site counts. Left out instead, the overall median is 10,767 rather than 10,684.

A title is lesson-shaped when it contains a teaching phrase: how to, how I, guide, tutorial, explained, step by step, for beginners, beginner, learn, setup, set up, strategy or walkthrough. That is 11,874 titles, 47.6% of the study.

A worked example

Take the most surprising row, retirement accounts, and redo it. Titles naming “401k”, “401(k)”, “Roth IRA” or “IRA” (whole word, so “miracle” does not count) come to 60 videos. Sort their view counts from lowest to highest. Sixty is even, so the median is the mean of the 30th and 31st values: 41,591 and 42,601. (41,591 + 42,601) / 2 = 42,096. That is the highest median of the 25 topics, from the smallest pile of videos.

The concentration figure works the same way. There are 24,924 videos with a visible count; 1% of that is 249 videos. The 249 most-viewed add up to 1,469,687,815 views. Divide by the study’s total of 4,061,826,125 views: 36.2%. The smallest video inside that top 1% has 2,595,487 views.

The original data

Most videos are barely watched

Almost half of the videos with a visible count, 12,211 of 24,924, have fewer than 10,000 views. A quarter never reach 1,000. At the other end, 789 videos have a million views or more. The median video in the study has 10,684 views, and the most-viewed one has 32,288,389.

This matters for anyone judging a strategy by its video. A video that ranks in search is not automatically a popular one, and most of what a beginner finds has been watched by very few people. The view count on a tutorial says little about whether its method works, and nothing about whether the people who watched it made money.

A few videos take most of the views

The distribution is steep, and it is steeper than the bars above suggest. The top 10% of videos, 2,492 of them, hold 79.6% of every view in the study. The bottom half of videos, more than twelve thousand, share 0.8%. Most of what trading education on YouTube is watched for comes from a small group of videos and channels. A beginner who searches a question and picks the first result is usually picking from that small group, which is why the same few explanations of a topic reach most viewers while thousands of alternatives go unseen.

Topics: how many videos, and how many views

The table counts 25 topics. “Videos” is how many titles name the topic, “median” is the median views of those videos, and “lesson-shaped” is the share of those titles that read as a lesson.

Supply and attention do not line up. The five most-made topics are day trading, forex, crypto, smart money concepts and TradingView, and only day trading of those has a median above 15,000 views. The chart topics that fill so much of trading YouTube sit near the bottom: MACD videos have a median of 3,645 views and chart pattern videos 2,814, and 80% of both stay under 50,000.

The channel counts show how crowded each topic is. TradingView’s 1,028 videos come from only 443 channels, about 2.3 videos per channel, so a handful of tutorial channels make most of them. Risk management is the opposite: 845 videos from 656 channels, so most channels that cover it do so once. Day trading has both the most videos and the most channels, 826, which is why a new video on it faces the most competition in search. For a beginner, the practical reading is that the most-made topics are not the ones people watch most, and the topics with the fewest videos are often the ones with the largest audience per video.

The highest medians belong to the money questions with the fewest videos. Retirement accounts (60 videos, median 42,096), taxes (85 videos, median 23,940) and ETFs and index funds (539 videos, median 18,431) are all ordinary-investor subjects. Risk management is the clearest mismatch the other way: 845 videos from 656 channels, a median of 3,954, and only 37% of its titles written as a lesson. Many channels make one video about it, and few people watch any single one.

Titles and length

Lesson-shaped titles, 11,874 of them, have a median of 15,670 views; the other 13,097 titles have 7,471, so a lesson-shaped title comes with about 2.1 times the median views. Titles phrased as a question, 1,657 of them, have a median of 11,291, close to the study as a whole. That is a correlation, not proof that a title causes views: channels that write lesson titles may differ in other ways.

Length separates the videos about as sharply as topic does. Videos of 20 to 30 minutes, 2,772 of them, have the highest median at 27,867 views, and 10 to 20 minutes is next at 20,266. Below 5 minutes the median falls to 1,400 or less. Only 183 videos in the study run under a minute, because search results for these questions are mostly long-form. The median video runs 12.1 minutes.

Channels

The study holds videos from 9,458 channels (counted by channel name). 6,608 of them, 69.9%, appear exactly once. The ten channels with the most videos in the results account for 1,335 videos between them:

This counts how often a channel appears in search results for these questions. It is not a ranking of quality or of subscribers. For transparency: this site’s author’s own channel, Michael Whitman, appears 45 times, with a median of 2,800 views, below the study median.

Years named in titles

The study has no upload dates, so it cannot show a trend over time. What it can show is which year a title names. 1,121 titles name 2026 (median 6,244 views), 356 name 2025 (median 14,481), 108 name 2024 (median 9,765) and 75 name 2023 (median 31,144). Newer videos have had less time to collect views, so the lower 2026 median is expected and says nothing about whether older videos were better.

When it fails

It is a snapshot of search results, not of YouTube. It holds what 1,409 searches returned in August 2026. A video that never ranked for one of those searches is missing, however popular, and the search list itself leans toward trading questions more than general investing.

View counts keep moving. Counts are as displayed at collection. A video uploaded in July 2026 had weeks to collect views; one from 2021 had years. With no upload dates in the file, age cannot be controlled for, which biases every comparison toward older topics and formats.

Titles are not content. A title that names a topic is not proof the video teaches it, or teaches it well. This report never says what a video contains, only what its title names and how many views it has.

Topic aliases are choices. “Options” includes titles that use the word in its trading sense and a few that do not; “fx” and “ai” are short words with some noise. The aliases are published with the counts so anyone can challenge them and recount.

Correlation is all it shows. Lesson-shaped titles and 20 to 30 minute lengths go with more views in this data. The data cannot say they cause them, and it says nothing about whether any strategy in any of these videos makes money.

Related

All six datasets behind the site’s figures, with downloads and the license, are on the research page, and the rules every page follows, including the recompute rule this report is built on, are set out in how this site is made. The most crowded topic in the study is explained on the day trading page, the vocabulary behind 1,057 of these videos is on the smart money concepts page, and the topic that is made often but watched little has its own page on risk management.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.