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Comment by bradleykingz | Hacker News Reader

We must have been reading vastly different articles

> Business has been good. “I make over $30,000 annually from forex trading now,” he revealed — a tempting figure in a country where public servants are paid some $177 a month. His earnings come mostly from his own trading, with student fees making up a small part.

Speaking from experience (I'm from Kenya), I've seen people make big bucks from Forex trading. A friend of mine makes enough money to pay for his rent (~$200 PM), furnish the house with not-so-cheap furniture and maintain his excessive lifestyle.

There may be a 'pyramid scheme' aspect to it, but it's not as rampant as you make it seem.

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Thats exactly what every person selling the scheme says. If you actually try and get them to show proof, they usually don't actually make that kind of money. Or if they do, they make it by selling courses or commission, not by trading.

I mean it is certainly possible to make money from forex, in the same way that you can make money playing roulette. But that's not how the people in this scheme are actually making money - if they were making money on forex, why would they bother selling courses instead of spending all day trading themselves?

Here's a video about IM academy: https://youtu.be/eKXrrsIIEhI. All these people selling the courses pretend to be independent or part of a smaller organization so you don't Google the name, but ultimately they are all in the IM academy pyramid.

The people being interviewed are the ones selling their courses to others. Of course they’re going to claim it’s very lucrative. If someone was losing money from something they’re trying to sell, they wouldn’t go on record with a newspaper proclaiming their losses to the world.

Perhaps, but at this point you're just assuming they're scoundrels. The article says he makes most of his income from trading. The first week of his course is free. It's $50/week after that. This is not a Bezos level of wealth.

Actually, one time payment of $50 for a lifetime access. Still high for their salaries though, it'd be something like $2,000 in US.

> I've seen people make big bucks from Forex trading.

I've also seen people making big bucks from what they claim is Forex trading. Whether that's actually true is up for debate - I've heard somewhere that on average even people who do this for a living as a job average ~10% annual returns, so "big bucks" here from trading alone seems unlikely when even the pros can't approach that?

10 percent per what? Annually?

Yes, annually - edited!

Thanks. Calculated in a stable currency (sort of USD) or does actually inflation dig into it?

> ~10% annual returns

That kinda checks out to me given the overall markets tend to return ~7% to 8%

Not with forex though, isn't forex pretty much 0 sum? So on average you should make no money

Ah my bad, I don't have much experience with forex

I have a data point from South Africa. My younger brother and our cousin, have nagged me in the past years to teach them 'how to trade'. Normally they would mean the process itself + some technical analysis.

Our cousin is 2 years ahead of my younger brother. He makes enough to find his side-lifestyle (he also works). My younger brother is still looking for work, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how much he's learn from YouTube, and that he turned a small profit.

Many of the bigger lifestyle focused people run scams. Some have been arrested, assets confiscated.

There's however a boom in the younger generation in their 20s, armed with $100 starting accounts, making money.

That’s just looking at one tail of the gain distribution curve. You just need a few big success to spread the idea that people will be rich.

You are aware that trading is a zero-sum game and that for every winner there's a loser who took the other side of the bet?

this is sort of a simplistic take. not everyone has the goal of making money on every single trade. say I buy some security from you, not because I expect it to go up, but because I believe it is uncorrelated with my other holdings. you realize a capital gain, and the value goes down the next day. did I lose? not really; we just had different goals.

edit: maybe a better example. I am confident in $SPCE over the next six months, and I want to open a long position. I want to slightly reduce the risk though, so I also buy an OTM put from you. $SPCE keeps going up, so the put expires worthless. we both won here. you collected the premium and I got into a long position that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Short term yes, long term no.

Care to elaborate? Are you saying that long term every trader makes money?

Long term non-trader money is also part of the market (stock buybacks, dividends).

These stocks represent part of existing companies. If these companies do well the stockholder will/might receive extra dividends. So if you have stocks of a single company then you will make money in the long run if the company does well (and vice versa). Generally people do not trust a single company, so if you diversify (different strategies apply here) you can make your outcome dependent on a countries economy or the world economy (if the world economy does well, your portfolio will do the same)

Oh sorry, I wasn't precise enough. I meant specifically forex traders (because the article was only about forex traders). Since currencies are not cash-flow producing assets, I don't see how, on average, everybody can end in the money.

About stocks I absolutely agree - history tells us there's a long-term positive (US) market return so it's clear that an average investor should get exactly that return minus costs/fees.

This is a good point. One could argue that some people buy currency on forex to use it for a different business which gives them a gain. So your selling benifits them and you.

The difference is you believe what the guy in the article says while other do not.

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