I was randomly flipping through channels last night with my girlfriend, and an infomercial on "4x" caught my attention. Yet another one of those "pay us for our black box trading indicators with lots of pretty green and red arrows to tell you when to buy or sell", only this one is specifically for trading currencies. The "4X" part of things really made me chuckle, since it is pronounced the same way as "forex" - sounds like their marketing guys wanted to capitalize on some of the buzz about forex trading by naming their product something that sounds identical to forex. Of course it also subtly implies that you will quadruple your money. Infomercial came complete with the long list of "personal success stories", suckers....I mean alleged customers...that talk about how wonderful life has become since they signed up. These guys are having a sales session...I mean seminar in my city next week, I'm actually somewhat tempted to go and watch how this type of event functions. Reminds me of the joke - "How do you make a million dollars as a trader? Write a book about how to make a million dollars as a trader." The thing that I can't understand about this is that if you want to trade, then learn how to trade. Using some sort of black box (unless you coded it for yourself) isn't going to teach you a thing. I should also mention that I've looked into the forex offerings of a few Canadian brokers (it's not so common yet up here in Canada), and I wasn't the least bit impressed. I think the spreads would make it very difficult to be successful, since you can only buy at the ask and sell at bid, you have to be very right just to break even (so risk management would be terrible). Add large amounts of leverage to that, and you basically have something that is very attractive to your broker, and a good way to slowly draw down your account to zero.
I agree completely,.. how the heck is one going to learn to trade by following a blackbox system (especially those being widely promoted to the retail markets).. Similarly, those who subcribe to the so-called 'signal service' providers and blindly follow trading signals trying to match their fills.. Do they really think that just purchasing 3 - 4k software or subscribing to $200/mo. for signal service will help them make money in the long term?
Do they really think that just purchasing 3 - 4k software or subscribing to $200/mo. for signal service will help them make money in the long term? Yes, they do. Don
I have a mid-term coming up in a week or so, so I may not attend the session (probably better to go to my class that afternoon). If I do, I'll be sure to get some info on the costs involved, and post again on this thread. I'm betting that it's probably some sort of upfront cost + ongoing subscription. If the initial cost is too high, they won't reel in very many people, and if they depend too heavily on subscriptions, they could probably encounter high subscription turnover. The fun part about this last night was trying to explain forex trading vs. equity trading to the girlfriend (I'm a finance major, nearly done my uni degree). I'm interested to see how these guys will go about explaining things, since it is fairly technical in nature (particularly if they talk about the fundamentals behind forex rates hehe).
Idiotic consumers or money hungry people that are not willing to do work will be dumb enough to buy it. It's all about the money and the idiots that keep those infomercials going by being stupid.