Many people have asked whether it is possible to make money by trading forex.
Every day, you can see advertisements promoting forex trading (or other instruments) seminars with the promise of making a full-time income using the techniques they teach.
I have not paid money to attend any of these seminars so I am unable to tell you for sure whether the methods taught at these seminars actually work. Personally, I don’t believe that attending a two or three-day event will make anyone a consistently profitable trader. It takes much more than that.
What I can tell you for sure is when the claims on the advertisements are untrue to the point of being ridiculous.
Here’s one:
Generate 20-40% returns monthly.
Let’s work out an example. If you start with just $1000, the numbers below show the money you have at the end of every year if you can achieve a 20% return every month.
1 year $8,916.10
2 years $79,496.85
3 years $708,801.87
4 years $6,319,748.72
5 years $56,347,514.35
6 years $502,400,097.98
7 years $4,479,449,738.82
8 years $39,939,223,824.27
9 years $356,102,131,442.61
10 years $3,175,042,373,780.32
At the end of 5 years, you will have $56 million dollars.
At the end of 8 years, you will have $39 billion dollars.
At the end of 10 years, you will have $3.1 trillion dollars.
At the end of 20 years, you will have $10,080,894,075,300,600,000,000. There is an outside chance this could be an amount greater than all the money in the world put together.
If anyone makes these kinds of claims to you, be wary – very wary.
Hopefully, MAS will one day start regulating such kinds of advertisements.