Thursday, September 14, 2017

EXPOSED: The Reality of Futures Trading and Investing

(GLOBALINTELHUB.COM) — 9/14/2017 — Trading is difficult, if it were easy there would be no losers – in order for there to be winners in markets, there have to be losers.  But trading is not impossible, and Wall St. has developed an industry out of it called “money management” which is effectively conservative trading.
But sometimes there are companies who simply mislead investors in to thinking that trading is easy, and these guys ‘putting golf clubs in their Porsche trunks’ simply discovered the ‘secret’ of life that it’s possible to click click click and get millions.  As hundreds of customers discovered, trading is not that easy.
forex
NFA orders Chicago, Ill., introducing broker Kingsview Futures LLC to pay a $50,000 fine
Reading NFA complaints is always interesting.  Here’s the highlights:
 217 Kingsview Futures customers with self-directed accounts traded in 2015.
203 of these customers (or 9 %) incurred total losses that exceeded $1.9 million.
More than 70% of the customers experienced losses exceeding $1,000, and
approximately 10% of them experienced losses exceeding $20,000. One
customer’s losses exceeded $225,000. In contrast, thirteen customers reported
gains in 2015, and only three of them had net profits exceeding $1,000. During
the same period, Kingsview Futures made commissions totaling more than
$208,000 from these customers.
235 Kingsview Futures customers with self-directed accounts traded in 2014.
226 of these customers (or 96%) incurred total losses of more than $1.5 million.
They claim that FX is the ‘risky market’ where 95% of traders lose.  At Oanda, 51% of customer accounts are profitable.
In any event, it’s always sad to see customers pay for something like ‘training and education’ lured by videos with private planes and fancy cars, and then to lose money.  Trading futures is really difficult.  Training and education isn’t always sufficient to make you a trader.  In fact, traders who go through ‘real’ training often don’t succeed.
As we’ve said often, FX provides a lot of opportunity for algorithmic systems – trading FX yourself, futures included – is nearly impossible.
Stick to a system or manager with a track record.  That doesn’t guarantee success of course, but it at least puts you in the spectrum of statistically possible success.