I know nothing about 4x trading. What I do know is:

My RE Broker just bought a 2005 Mercedes 500 SL CASH!!! and is trading in the hundreds of thousands in:

www.fxcm.com

He has a securities broker who pulls funds and makes buys for his clients and emails them every day with the progress. I personally saw his (my RE Broker's) earnings - it made my jaw drop!

Anyone here do this Foreign Exchange Trading? I am interested in this - I would not be doing the trading; this guru that is a Broker with the www.fxcm.com would be. I was told nothing less than 300% return annually! (Yes I know what you're [and my little inside voice] is thinking.

But then again, personally with Real Estate I made a killing the last few yearz!

Is this 4X Kewl? Or is it too late ?

Thankx!

Professional Traders who can make 300% annually are hard to find, but they certainly don't need your help as a financial backer. Expert traders who run successful hedge funds usually charge their clients a fixed percentage of 2% annually and also take 20% of the profits. They also don't promise a goal return of much more than 15%. Steer Clear.

I played the FX game for a while. I came up with a statistical formula that was mathematically guaranteed to earn me money over time. The system worked like a charm - In 2 months of part time FX trading I made 40%. However, I didn't account for human error. I fell asleep at the keyboard once, and woke up with 1/3 of my money gone (the system protected 2/3ds of my money in case of a statistically unlikely event). After that loss, I never went back to trading, and never will - until I find a programming guru who will program the logic of my ideas into an automatic trading algorithm.

You know, there are some very smart people with a lot of resources and access to bleeding edge technology. How come they never seem to have a Mathematically Guaranteed Statistical Formula to earn money over time?

BTW, I fancy myself a programming dude of sorts. I've written a program that performs a scientific statistical algorithm to produce potential winning lotto numbers and it is Guaranteed to select a combination of numbers that have the best possible chance of legally winning the jackpot. There is NO OTHER SYSTEM THAT IS BETTER THAN MINE. I GUARANTEE IT. And it's quick too.

(Message edited by smitopher on April 30, 2007)

Dub,

Seriously dude......

re-title this thread, "welcome to kool-aide anonymous"

I am surprised that I neglected to follow up here on this board. Maybe I did in another thread? I know I did on TJA - but nevertheless: For those interested:

I lost $50,000 cash; more or less overnight. I went into slow motion and depression for a couple of days. Then went to Thailand to "get well...."

Fortunatly our tax system in the US allows people as stupid as I was to "recover per a passive tax loss carry-over for 3 years."

So after the next $50,000 of income - I was not required to pay income tax - thus "wiping the slate clean" of my catastrophic failure of intelligence.

In short, FOREX made someone else $50,000 very quickly, but not me. I lost. The broker who sponsored me and a few others also lost big time. Fortunatly, our core competencies were in Real Estate and not ForEx - so we have all since recovered financially. But we have all deleted t the ForEx sites from our favorites.

\m/

Metal-- yes these are always guaranteed cash, just not for the sucker who forks over his/her money.

As for your tax right off logic, not paying taxes on 50k income hardly equates to a 50k cap loss. Does the US Gov consider foreign exchange losses materially different than a short term cap gain loss?

I am not a tax professional, I do not even understand my tax return reporting completely -but with a few bad investments in the past few years, it's as if I broke even.

I can't wait until the bottom hits in Real Estate so I can unleash my wrath and buy them up! (Tenants Beware, Metal is coming for his rent).

You don't break even by losing money. You just offset gains - income, investment income, etc - with the loses on your taxes. If you have $100 but lose $50, then make $50, you're back at $100 but if you hadn't lost, you would be at $150. Same general principle applies to tax offsets, just with the knowledge that the $50k you lost only offsets the taxes that would be paid on a 50k gain - maybe $12,000 or so.

So basically, don't lose $50,000 to get back $12,000 in taxes.

FOREX is basically the old day traders moving to a new vehicle.

Honestly this is trading not investing. I've spent a lot of time investigating this as part of my Financial Advisor practice.

You are better off buying individual securities where there is at least a little bit of predictability for the average investor.

Really the only people making decent money in FOREX are those that literally watch it at all times during their trading window or large institutions.

Only use money you can afford to lose in FOREX because you will double your money one day and lose it all the next.

If you want to proceed anyway, I would suggest you stick with the major currencies. The YEN is the best because the Japanese government offers a little incentive to sweeten the deal in trading their currencies.