Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Currency trading is like gambling



20 May 2012
Editor, Forum Page
Straits Times

Some educated people who lost their jobs want to trade in currencies to make
a living. They have heard stories from friends who claimed to have made money
through trading.

They should realize that currency trading is like gambling and that they can
make a profit or a loss. Like gambling in a casino, it is likely that they will
lose money in the long run.

Some have paid fees of $3,000 to attend a 3 day training course, in the hope
of learning the techniques to trade profitably. A few people that I knew had
attended these expensive courses and were disappointed that the techniques
did not work and they have lost their capital. The experts in forex trading
have told me that it is not possible for a novice to learn the
trading techniques through a training course.

 A friend who had attended such a course told me that that he could learn
more reliable techniques from the free online courses.

For people who insist on giving forex trading a try, I suggest that they enrol and
open a demo account in an online trading platform, learn the techniques from the
online courses and try trading with the demo account for three months.

If they found that they are able to trade profitably at the end of three months,
they can then convert to a live account and trade with real money.

Most of them will probably find that trading is stressful and difficult,
and it is more likely that they will make a loss on trading.

If they wish to find a better way to invest their savings to produce a decent income
over the long term, they should attend the educational talk conducted by
consumer based organisations, such as the Financial Services
Consumer Association (www.fisca.sg).

Tan Kin Lian
President
Financial Services Consumer Association

3 comments:

Tan Kin Lian said...

Mr Tan,

I refer to your article on Forex Trading on ST today.

I agree forex trading is not as easy as one expects just because it is the world's most liquid instrument trading 24-hours giving lots of opportunity to trade. I am happy to inform you that the broking house I work with (OANDA) offers a life-time demo account. It does not expire.

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Miko said...

Basically , all those 2 to 3 days courses are selling dream one,telling you the strategy can make 10 to 30% returns monthly, the trainer trade his own acct from few thousand to over few hundred thousand in a year. But they never think the trainer is using free funding which is the student's school fee to gamble, he will only market the acct he grows but never tell you how many acct he blew. Those educated people is blinded by greed basically, nowadays a fresh financial engineer who graduated from NTU/NUS is being paid 7 to 10K basic per mth at their first year (bonus is not counted). If a forex student is thinking of paying few thousands for a 2 days course can out-performance a group of institution traders in long run, why not the banks just sack all these financial expertise in their organization and save up the salaries and huge bonus to just hire this type of school trainer. I agree that it is better to learn from internet for free, frankly speaking, how much you can learn in 2 days in order to understand the currency market,and this school will accept anyone who is willing to pay, basically no pre-requisite. Ask yourself, if you put a university student and a primary school student in a same class, what you can teach in order to make both of them understood

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