Four years ago if you walked down the busy streets of Kuala Lumpur on a forex trading platforms hot afternoon lunch break and asked strangers if they knew what forex trading was, you would’ve gotten blank stares. Only those in the banking sector and those that were investment savvy would know what you were talking about.
Fast forward to 2009 and i have found that a great number of people have at the very least a general inkling of what forex trading is. This is true for the city folk at least. And we have the internet to thank for this. Since the advent of online forex trading, the currency markets have never been as accessible to the masses than it is today. This phenomena is not geo-located to a handful of countries but is affecting the entire world. People from Russia, China, Africa and even smaller countries such as Sri Lanka have started dabbling in the forex market via their computer.
And why not, with the increasing attention being paid to the forex market every year, forex brokers are all vying for a piece of the pie. This has brought up stiff competition among them and has brought the requirements for an online forex trading account to ridiculously low heights. So low in fact that a forex trading account from major forex brokers can be had for twenty bucks. Twenty American Dollars is about 68 Malaysian ringgit. 68 ringgit can’t even buy a nice steak dinner for two in this country. Simply put, forex accounts can be had for a song.
This in turn makes forex trading very accessible to anybody with some change to spare, a computer and a broadband connection. And wherever you find a business activity with great opportunity, you’ll invariably find the scammers as well. Never ones to be left out, they have crawled from what shadowy dens they reside in to prey on the few, the unlucky and the ignorant. And the question they seem to be asking everybody is this. How would you like to attend a 3 day course that will enable you to make a $1000 USD a day trading currencies?
Their venue of choice are hotels where they book expensive conference halls to give their sales pitch. Having been to at least 30 of these so called seminars, i can safely say that the vast majority didn’t know what they were talking about. They were just there to sell a product that was undoubtedly rehashed and repackaged. Distressingly, some of them never touched on a single aspect of forex trading, rather, they were sales people planting ideas of riches in the minds of listeners while skirting the topic of forex trading itself. They advertise their courses through the newspaper, the internet or simply via word of mouth. The price? Up to $6000 ringgit for a 3 month course.
$6000 ringgit is more than two months salary of the average Malaysian worker. Having come across a few old friends that have signed up for these courses, the education they received seems to be repackaged technical trading courses gained from the internet. The basic stuff, support and resistance, fibonacci lines, daily pivots. Most of which, can be learned for free if you dig around the internet. After touching on the basics of currency trading, they get to the meat of the course, the trading strategy. One course offered a 5 and 30 EMA crossover strategy. Yep, no joke. Buy if EMA 5 is crosses over 30 and sell if the opposite happens. This particular strategy works well in a trending market but the minute the market starts ranging, you’re in trouble. Choppy conditions will stop out most short term trades. $6000 ringgit for an EMA crossover strategy, unbelievable.
Scammers aren’t a Malaysian problem, they’re a global problem. But it is particularly distressing to me because the only bills i had to pay to get my forex trading career started was the monthly cost of my broadband connection. I participated in online discussions, spent hours digging through old forum posts for bits of buried treasure and finally had a wide variety of trading strategies at my fingertips. All which i’m sure would cost thousands of ringgit. The fact of the matter is this. It shouldn’t cost thousands of ringgit to install a EMA crossover forex robot on the computer. Yet many of my countrymen are continually falling for these get rich quick schemes. But at the same time, it can’t just be happening in Malaysia.
My friend that attended one of these courses spent 16k ringgit for the course and the account deposit. He has since blown his account. The moral of the story? Don’t believe the hype. Take the time to learn from free sources in the internet. Am i saying all online forex trading courses are rubbish? Certainly not. I’m merely saying most of them aren’t worth the money and can be had for free. I’d also like to recommend the ever excellent forexfactory.com to all experienced and beginning forex traders. Other websites of interest include Fxstreet, Oanda forums and Dailyfx.