I want to make some money duing the hours / day I spend on the internet.

October 14, 2006 9:27 PM

What's with these FOREIGN EXCHANGE programs / workshops that I've recently seen advertised in infomercials recently ? Can one really make money doing this ? Do I need a lot of capital ? Have any mefites any experience or insight ?
posted by dawdle to work & money (11 comments total)

1. You can make money trading forex

2. It is really hard to not lose money

3. The industry is largely unregulated, so you can do silly things like get 200:1 leverage (ie, trade $200,000 worth of yen with USD $1000 in your account). If your trade moves against you, your $1000 account can quickly become a $0 account.

4. Considering the current marke/economy, you are MUCH better of trading stocks on one of the major US exchanges.
posted by b1tr0t at 10:04 PM on October 14, 2006

Without any knowledge of anything you are talking about, I will offer a simple fact of life: If it seems to good to be true it probably is.
posted by SirStan at 10:12 PM on October 14, 2006

3. The industry is largely unregulated, so you can do silly things like get 200:1 leverage (ie, trade $200,000 worth of yen with USD $1000 in your account). If your trade moves against you, your $1000 account can quickly become a $0 account.

More importantly, your $1000 acount can quickly become a -$199,000 account. (or more likely, a -$10,000 account -- but still)

As for the commercials, if they really knew how to trade forex successfully they wouldn't be spending their time mass marketing schemes to other people.
posted by tkolar at 10:12 PM on October 14, 2006

It's high-stakes gambling unless you have the resources of a major bank at your disposal.

Sometimes it is for them, too. I can't find a link right now, but there have been a couple of high profile scandals in the last ten years where currency traders associated with major banks managed to louse up and lose upwards of a billion dollars each for their banks.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:00 PM on October 14, 2006

This is driving me nuts. There was one case where a trader in South American lost billions of dollars in currency trading.

And there was a trader based in Hong Kong who worked for a major British bank who also managed to lose billions of dollars.

With the search terms I've been using I've been finding links to the National Australian Bank case, but that one was small by comparison to the two I'm thinking of. Anyone else help me out here?

Currency trading is speculation, nothing more, and it's an odds-against game because the banks take a cut when you convert one currency into another.

As to the classes you're referring to: "Forex Scams"

And the obvious question: if they knew how to consistently win at currency exchange speculation, why would they be wasting their time teaching classes?
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:43 PM on October 14, 2006

Welcome to the official website of Nick Leeson – the rogue trader whose unchecked risk-taking caused the biggest financial scandal of the century.
posted by Wolof at 12:24 AM on October 15, 2006

The movie Rogue Trader, with Ewan McGregor, tells the story of Nick Leeson, a currency trader with Barings in Hong Kong, who lost billions on the Singapore monetary exchange.
posted by solid-one-love at 12:25 AM on October 15, 2006

Damn you,GadgetWolof. Next time.
posted by solid-one-love at 12:25 AM on October 15, 2006

With currency trading, there are people in the market - and they are the majority of the market - who trade professionally, all the time. They have deep pockets because they work for financial institutions, and they have less personal skin in the game than you, because the capital belongs to their employer and not to them.

You are a rank amateur. You cannot hope to beat such people at what seems like a game, but is their livelihood.

That said, things that make money are not advertised. If I have a money-making scheme, I keep it to myself. What you see advertised are things that sound as though they make money. There is a big difference.

If the advertising features people who have been very successful, understand that firstly, their success may be misstated or overstated, and secondly, that in any enterprise there will be the odd outlier who succeeds through sheer luck. The advertisers are not showing all the people who sustained losses and gave up. ("But they didn't follow our method properly". "They didn't really want to be successful." "They didn't have what it takes.")

It is possible people will show up in this thread and say "I make heaps of money trading forex." And I will say that a) they are unrepresentative of all the amateurs who have ever tried and b) in all likelihood, they will blow up soon.

Think of all the genuinely rich, successful people you can, whose stories are verifiable. How many of them did so through a method/product/strategy advertised via informercials?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:13 AM on October 15, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh yeah. Those shiny happy promoters? They do have a secret to making money easily. It is to sell plausible bullshit that appeals to the cupidity of rubes.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:16 AM on October 15, 2006

Nick Leeson's losses came from trading Nikkei futures, not forex. But his experience is a particularly devastating example of what can happen when the market moves against an unbalanced, leveraged position.
posted by blue mustard at 4:54 AM on October 15, 2006