Although I don’t like playing the money game with pennies, I am a pretty frugal fellow, so I enjoyed reading Eight Sure-Fire Ways to Sock Away $100 published by Free Money Finance. And while on saving, check out the two secrets with instant gratification as suggested by Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Buffet seems to read my blog *grin*. When the market falls he is buying stocks.

The Canadian Capitalist has revisited high interest savings accounts.

The DINKs ask how bad is inflation really. Pretty bad, but only if you can’t beat it – I would say.

Generation X Finance suggests some ideas to Achieve Financial Peace With an Emergency Fund.

If you are in a financial mess, Money Crashers suggest two possible reasons for that.

Are you looking to buy a house? Moneymonk argues if not buying a house means complete freedom. After such a post it seems appropriate to think about the role of real estate in your portfolio.

Oh yes, and finally, the dollar keeps going nowhere. Just my 2 Euro cents.

In the end of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 a stock market crash all over the world ate up to 25% investment capital.

Lucky you, if you didn’t have stocks or mutual funds at that time. There was similar crash in September 2001. There will be similar crashes in the future. Stocks And Mutual Funds Work Better In Bullish Market Some stock traders do well with short trading, but the truth is in most cases it’s all about good times for the markets. In the last few years many stock traders and mutual funds in East Europe achieved outrageous returns of 100% of more per year.

“Those are damn good traders and managers!”

Yeah, sure. If the markets were not raising all the times you would never see such figures. The crash in 2007-2008 proved it. The best performing mutual fund in Bulgaria for example lost more than the stock market down. They weren’t good, they were simply riding the wave until it was good.

Traditional investing methods don’t work well in bear markets.

Credit Default Swaps Are Exactly For Bear Markets

If you wonder what exactly this is and like to read complex financial explanations, go check Wikipedia’s page on credit default swaps. If you are lazy like me, here is a simple explanation:

Credit Default Swap (CDS) is a contract between two market players (parts). The first party pays fixed fees for a given period. The other party pays only if a credit even like bankruptcy or debt restructuring happens. Even simpler and shorter, when the market falls you want to be the first party. You want to be the one who paid fixed fee during given time to protect someone’s risk.

These who owned CDS at the end of 2007 made a good buck.

When, Where And How To Buy Credit Default Swaps

Actually the answers to where and how are pretty simple. Go at your local bank or trusted financial institution and ask them about CDS. They will be happy to provide you with full instructions and contacts.

When is always a very important question in investing. The prices of the CDS are most attractive when the risk is lowest. The risk is considered lowest when the market has been rising for long time and no one expects crashes. Except us, the sharks.

How and when to catch the exact moment? If someone claims to know that, he or she is simply lying. I definitely don’t know that myself, but I know tips to guess it with a good chance for success. They are not a subject of this article however.

The article about Betting Academy posted at the end of December resulted in a lot of feedback, which makes me think you could be interested in other bet trading systems. Actually, there is some relation between the two articles because Matt from Pro X Trading is the same Matt that was discussed in the Betting Academy post.

Enough chit-chat, let’s get into the details.

Pro X Trading is offering a system and club for professional sports trading (betting). The founder of the company is Matt Finnigan, a sports betting strategist.

The Trading Club is a paid service that’s going to accept only 100 members worldwide because it includes one on one mentoring on the Betfair Trading systems.

The cost to join the club is GBP 150 with ongoing GBP 50 each 4 weeks.

If you want to know more about the system, check here.

This club is not trading your money, but only giving advice, mentoring and picks. This requires more involvement from you, but removes the risk of the club owner to disappear with your money.

There is not much info about expected profits or past performance, but some of their members are said to be making up to 80% per trading cycle (4 weeks), so that could be quite hot.

What’s my take?

Well, I exchanged few mails with Matt and he seems to know his stuff. Sports trading is not very important part of my investing strategy, so I’ll probably miss the club. But if you feel interested and have some time to take the game seriously, you can go for it.

Just don’t forget sports trading is one of the riskiest investments you could make. So be careful and keep it small portion of your portfolio. On the other hand it can bring profits that are not achievable by anything else (well, except of crime I guess).

If you have read the Forex Signals Tutorial and my first impressions about Millennium Traders, you have figured out that I really liked them. I still think that moderator guy JT knows his stuff, although the end of January and beginning of February has been quite poor for my trading with them. There were mostly signals which were hitting the stop loss and the few good ones didn’t make anything more than 10 – 20 pips.

The thing which worried me most and made my decision to stop using them was the stats on their home page. Even in the bads week the forex trading room the stats keep showing positive results.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying they fake their results. I believe they are not. There problem is these results are hypothetical based on no-one-can-tell-you-what-exactly. I would expect the results to be based on the positions which the moderators open and close and that’s probably the case. The problem is that when being in the room you get only their open alert. Then the standard 3 targets come and “Consider selling” (if the trade is a success), but you never know when the mod really closes his trade.

I know not to expect exact duplicating of the moderator’s results, but I would like a way to be as close as possible to them. Millennium Traders is not letting this happen. Therefore I am quitting.

Regardless of what I just wrote, I still think Millennium Traders offers one of the most professional services in the signals business. I plan to give them a second try pretty soon. But being a bit disillusioned by forex (because of the most managed accounts failures recently), I think I’ll try some of their stock trading rooms.

I am suspicious to strategies, but 28% yearly ROI for 17 years is certainly something that can make me think different. To achieve that GetFolio is using a mathematic strategy for stock trading. The strategy is supposed to avoid big drawdowns and let you sleep well at night.

The type of service is close to trading signals – you receive stocks picks with alerts when to buy and sell. Unlike most signals however, GetFolio is not for day traders. Their strategy is for long term growth, therefore you can’t expect very high ROI of course.

Their FAQ page advices that the minimum capital required to use the service is $20,000. That might not be good for everyone, but for moderate risk investment there is no way to go lower (Do you really care to make 28% per year on $1,000?).

Unlike most investment services GetFolio has quite a bold guarantee:

“We guarantee that your ROI, will outperform the market for the period of your subscription, or we will refund your subscription fee.”

That’s sweet of course, but don’t get too attached to it. If the market goes down 20% and you lose 19%, they still have outperformed it.

The subscription fee for the service is $599 annually. That’s not cheap, but is cheaper than most forex signals, so I wouldn’t mind paying it if I can invest more than $20k in the markets they trade.

GetFolio yields a bit lower than the typical investment opportunity reviewed at this blog. But I believe your portfolio needs to consist of at least 30%-40% such more secure assets. So if you can afford it, consider looking deeper into it.

Have you heard the term domainer?

While thousands of bloggers and forums pollute the Web with “make money online”, there are people who actually make a lot of it without spreading affiliate checks on blogs. Such people don’t even have blogs. They don’t work online to make money, they invest in the web for profits that most people will never see.

Picture by Queen Coffee at Flickr

The domainers own, buy, sell, develop, rent or register hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands of domains. Note that I am not saying websites, because pretty often there is nothing on these domains except ads or capture pages.

How Does It Work

I believe it became clear, but I’ll say it again. Domain investing is different than typical “make money online” business. There are thousands of guides out there who claim to teach you how to make money on Internet. Most of that advice is full of crap, some is good, but in both cases it’s not interesting for us. Because it requires work.

Domain investing on the other hand is semi-active investment strategy much closer to stock trading or real estate investing. You have heard about internet real estate, haven’t you? Domains are the internet real estate and investing in them works in a similar way. You buy, sell, rent, trade or hold for profits.

Types Of Domain Investing

Like the real world properties domains can bring residual income and at the same time grow in value. Domains are even better than real estate because they don’t amortize with the time. The search engines love older domains, so the older your domain becomes, the better.
You can consider the following options to invest in domains:

• Trade domain names. Find good domain names sold for cheap and sell them on better price. There are undervalued domains out there, but you will rarely find them on domain marketplaces.
• Buy and hold (park). Most domainers hold hundreds of thousands of domain names. They simply place PPC ads on the (Adsense or affiliatre ads), and collect the profits. The key here is that the domain name needs to attract incoming traffic.
• Buy and develop. A smarter but a lot more involved strategy is to buy good old brandable or keyword rich domains and to develop sites on them. Developing sites sounds like work, but if you outsource, it is not.
• Buy entire websites. Some domainers buy existing websites with traffic and revenue to run or resell them. Trading a website is like trading a business.
• Register free domains to resell, hold/park or develop. A new domain name costs less than $10. If you are able to find good domain names and register them, you can sell them later for much bigger price. Alternatively you can hold them or develop sites on them

I didn’t give you much details on the strategies above, because each of them needs a separate blog post. And you guessed it, such articles will come soon. If you don’t want to miss them, make sure to subscribe by email or RSS.

For now you can continue reading with the next article – How to find domain investing deals.

Here is another medium risk managed forex account. Devrim is offered by PFGBEST and traded by a turkish trader named Devrim Akyil.

The funny thing is they don’t offer full details on PFGBEST website so further information about the managed account should be obtained by phone, mail or third party sources. I’ll save you the initial research:

Minimum investment: $5,000

Date of inception: October 2006

Average ROI: 2.98% per month

Maximum Leverage: 30:1

Sharp Value: 8.78

So far it has never had a negative month. Of course, there is always time to “improve” that.

Generally Devrim seems like safe option in the world of forex managed accounts. Not aiming for 100% yearly ROI like other services, but not pulling your nerves with huge drawdowns either. For a $5k account seems rather good opportunity.

If you want to invest you can do that on PFGBEST site.