Leverage of 500-to-1 Is Luring Day Traders to Currency Markets

Samantha Greer is definitely not your stereotypical day trader.

She’s a 46-year-old lawyer in Nottingham, England, who begins her day at 5 a.m. poring over market trend charts and punching in trades — maybe £1,000 ($1,350) a pop if she feels confident; just a couple hundred if she doesn’t — before whipping up breakfast for her son, dropping him at school and rushing into the office to start her legal job at 10 a.m.

What’s more, she trades none of the high-octane, boom-or-bust assets — the meme stocks and levered ETFs and cryptocurrencies — that day traders have turned into ...