At the end of every month I am sharing with you some good things posted by fellow bloggers. So March is not an exception, the links are below (they all open in new window or tab):

• Alan reviews Power Forex Managed Account and offers a deal to join with low minimum.
• Lesley Scorgie shares her Frugal Fundamentals
• Is 10% return on equities a myth? Blueprint for Financial Prosperity has the answer.
• I-marketing has made a nice collection of free online forex trading courses.
• The Simple Dollar has so many great posts that it was very hard to pick one. But anyway, you must read at least this.
• Silicon Valley Blogger suggests how you can survive the recession
• Is your house in danger of foreclosure? Check seven ways to save it from that.
• It’s just money reveals some of the problems in the MLM “Business”
• Can you raise funds thru card games? Debbie Dragon has some ideas.
• James from The DINKs thinks why Black and Hispanic are poorer

I was a bit hesitant if to present you these managed accounts at all. To be frank, I don’t think these guys are very professional. On the other hand their un-leveraged program has been bringing stable conservative ROI since 2006 which makes me think they must have a decent system. So, let me go ahead and present you the FX Street Managed Forex Account in short:

MAP 8304 CYCLE FX UNLEVERAGED

This is their conservative program running since 2006. The minimum investment here is $100,000 and the return since inception is 24.23%. This makes 1.62% monthly ROI – nothing hot, but stable if you can afford such big investment.

MAP G8 FX VALUE GROWTH LEVERAGED

I was interested in this managed account, because its minimum is only $2,500. The problem is that the results are very volatile which seems to be a rule in the low entry managed forex accounts. The return since inception is actually better – 25.64% since March 2007 which makes 2.33% average monthly ROI. The most unpleasant part is that they had quite a big drawdown of 14.95% last October and last two months are negative in row.

Last two months are December 2007 and January 2008 because they still have not updated February results. This is one of the reasons to call them not very professional. The other reason is that I applied a couple of months ago and still have to hear from them about my account. I’ve heard similar complains from other investors, which makes me thing their customer service isn’t rocking.

If by any chance you are already an active investor and know fresher results, please let me hear them. I will make another effort to contact them about my account, because I still want to give this service a try. $2,500 is a nice minimum at least.

You can recognize the regular, ordinary, mediocre investors in a minute. They make money when the economy grows. They sell their shirts when the recession starts.

Photo by thinkpanama at Flickr

Wanna be one of them?

I bet no. You beg to differ too. How to be a different, successful investor no matter on the current economical situation?

1. Buy at low times. I’ll keep saying this again and again. When everyone sells, you should buy. When the prices are falling, you should buy.

2. Borrow money. If you don’t have money to buy now, borrow them. A good deal is always a good deal – a good deal beats the loan interests. So don’t miss the good deals just because you can’t afford them.

3. Save regularly. The successful investors always spend less than they make. The key reason for the rest of people to live in the rat race is that they spend more than they make.

4. Sell at high times. When the prices are growing and everyone is buying like crazy, it’s your time to capitalize these profits. You may miss some further price increase? Possible. But when the prices of anything (example: houses) are so high that they don’t make sense, chances are the prices will drop (example: houses).

5. Don’t do what the masses do. When everyone buys gold, you look for something else. When everyone takes loans, you get out of debt.

6. Use the banks. The banks are your friends. They’ll lend you money and good price when you need to make a good deal.

7. Follow the other sharks. There are always people who are ahead of the others in their investments. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just follow them. Some of them even have blogs *sigh*

8. Be creative. Investing is an art. Don’t expect to find the coolest investment in the newspapers. Be creative. Think what will be hot next year, next two years or ten years ahead – and reserve your “ticket” to it from now. (Don’t you wish that few years ago you invested in petrol? Was it so hard to predict the huge raise in price?)

9. Ideas are the best investment. That’s true, not gold, not properties, but ideas. One guy made an ugly web page and earned a million. Wouldn’t it be nice if you bought his idea for $1,000?

10. When there are no good deals, invest in yourself. When you don’t know where to invest, don’t forget your mind is your most valuable asset. Educate yourself, buy books, go to seminars, subscribe to membership services. You never know which one of them will significantly change your life – usually for few hundred bucks.

I hope I gave you some good food for thought. Do you have some more?

Just recently FXCM announced two new managed account services. Both of them accept minimum investment of just $1,000 which immediately makes them attractive for risk takers like you and me.

The details in really short:

SHORT-TERM OPPORTUNITY PROGRAM

Hypothetical performance for the last 12 months: 36.62% or 3% per month

Minimum account size: $1,000

SHORT-TERM OPPORTUNITY AGGRESSIVE PROGRAM

Hypothetical performance for the last 12 months: 83.72% or 7% per month

Minimum account size: $1,000

I said it will be short. For a more detailed information just visit FXCM page and have a look.

I want only to emphasize on something. The results are hypothetical. They don’t tell us much. The programs are brand new and the real results can differ a lot, so invest at your own risk (but you like to risk, don’t you?). 7% per month is bloody good if they really can do it, that’s what I know for sure.

Before going in you may want to check Alan’s note and ask him how his Sentiment is going.

When was the last time when you lost money while investing?

Photo by anahitox at Flickr

My first time was when I was sixteen. I invested in a “business” of selling post cards to tourist in a Summer resort. My investment wasn’t big as I had only to buy 10 pieces of each card, so it made something like 500 post cards. The business didn’t work out however so I had to close the “shop” (a table on the street) and go back home. I had about 200 cards left and I had the choice to either keep staying there day after day trying to sell them, or sell them discounted to my competition on the next street. I’ve chosen the latter. I lost money and learned that sometimes it’s better to sell out my positions at loss rather than to keep them and hope for the best. I had better things to do.

Just recently I lost a nice amount of money again due to my habit to keep cash online. No, I wasn’t robbed or hacked fortunately. But the few thousands dollars I was keeping online for years just because I did not need them have lost more than 30% of their value due to the dollar crash. Add another 30% inflation for that time in my country and you’ll see me losing more than half of actual value. I lost money and learned that money not invested is money lost.

Sometimes we have to lose money in order to gain good lessons. Make losing sexy and use the lessons learned to improve your investment strategy. Losing is not scary. Not taking actions is.

When was the last time when you lost money while investing?

This pick is a bit different than most, because I won’t be talking about a specific opportunity. Unlike the most other picks, the opportunities here require higher capital investment. Well, at least most of them.

Even if you have not yet reached the point to have $50,000 – $100,000 or more, read this pick – you may find yourself interested to be on the other side of the game – i.e. the one who seeks funding.

Angel Investing is a concept that I’ll discuss again and again on the blog. This time what I want to present you shortly is a community network where you can find investment opportunities – Go Big Network.The site allows you do much more than finding investing opportunities – you can find job or customers for your services, you can hire professionals for your company or you can find funding and loans for your startup.

The registration is free, but don’t rush to register if you don’t plan to participate, because they have serious registration forms.

But you probably want to know more about the investment opportunities, so let me tell you a bit about them. The site allows you to search within funding requests posted from startup companies. What you need to search for is Funding Needed category to find the requests.

There are all kind of requests posted – from real estate companies to web projects. The funding requests start from $10,000 and exceed several millions.

If you like some opportunity and wish to contact the member, you will need to pay a 2-3 digits membership fee. This ensures at least some basic filtering of spam and scam.

Go Big Network is not an investment opportunity itself, but gives access to thousands of opportunities to become an Angel Investor. I think it’s a good thing to share with you.

If you have already used them, share your experience please.

It’s been few weeks since the last update on the managed trading accounts I am watching or using. If you consider joining some of them, have a look below and see if some of the information is important and can make up or change your mind.

FXFarEast firstly reviewed in October last year totally stopped showing their past performance. I have inquired them and hope to get a response soon (I’ll update this post then).

FXCM managed forex whose minimum was $1,000 is now accepting no less than $5,000. They had a third negative month in a row and the biggest drawdown so far – -7.90% in the Sentiment program and -15.70% in Sentiment aggressive. Painful, no doubts.

Best Trading Systems managed forex accounts, known as Orca and Rusky have their site non functional for several months. Their email is also not reachable which makes me think this service is gone down the roads.

At the time I reviewed DEV I was not yet sure if it’s any good, but I am getting more and more convinced it is. Besides that it’s results are updated regularly, it’s a service which seems to have a sound and sustainable trading strategy. Their months are all positive and the February result is 5.66%.

Not everything is forex. Schwab’s Market Neutral Option Writing Strategy still accepts $10,000 minimum. The last year they closed at great profits of 40.39% (for just five months), but January 2008 hit 21.28% loss. February is better with gain of 7.35%.

Milbay Finance which was picked in January is still doing fine and achieved 3.08% in February. The ROI for 2008 so far is 3.85%. The minimum is still $5,000 which si pretty cool for such a careful trading service.

And finally, after the horrible January GalleonFX made wonderful February with 16.8% profit in my Euro PAMM account. Galleon keeps kicking in March and the minimum is temporary only $2,000, so now is the best time for you to join if you have not done that yet. Full and a bit dated review of GalleonFX is available here.

That’s all from me now, if you have in mind other managed trading accounts and want to see them reviewed and tracked, don’t be shy, let me hear you.

“I can’t invest in real estate because I am not rich.”

If that’s what you’re saying, you have a problem. And it’s not that you are not rich. The problem is that you think you must be rich to invest in real estate.

Photo by jcarter at Flickr

The Myth About Real Estate Investing

It’s true that most real estate (RE) investors are big players who buy big properties or lands where to build commercial or residential property.

It’s true also that there are many small RE investors who manage to make profits even if their net worth is much less than the price of a single of their investment.

How?

Real Estate Investing Strategies To Think About

Now, let me first be frank to you – most people who talk about investing in real estate with no cash at all are just trying to sell you the next e-book or seminar. I am not trying to sell you anything, so I’ll be honest and tell you that doing RE investing without money is close to impossible.

But you can do it with very little money. And the less you spend, the higher ROI you can achieve… The less you spend, the higher ROI you can achieve.

Before thinking about strategies, consider that you will need a bank / mortgage credit. Even if you are not short in money, it still makes more sense to use funding because of the leverage effect.

So here we go:

• Leverage with credit (low risk). That’s a must do always. You should not go investing in a property if you don’t expect it’s price to raise higher than the bank mortgage rates. Even 1% better increase per year means a lot when you invest only the down payment and use a bank credit for the rest. This is quite a powerful concept so I will write an entire post about it soon.
• Buying a small property (high risk). Sounds obvious, but yet people think they need millions to invest in real estate. Look outside of the big city, there are houses for sale which cost 5% of the price of same size property in the big city. Yes, the market in the smaller towns is much lower, but still most of these properties are under-priced. With some marketing and improvement such a house can be resold with 50% profit in 6 months. If you leverage with a bank credit this could mean huge profits. Imagine small house worths $20,000: you enter with only $4,000 + $4,000 your money (down payment + improvement and marketing) and sell the house for $36,000. Yields pure profit close to $7k in six months (considering whopping 5% interest paid to the bank) which means 90% profit for you.
• Use other people’s money (medium risk). You may need this if you want to buy a higher price property but don’t have enough cash even for the down payment. You can borrow money from other investors and give them good interest. As long as the interest is lower than the profits you expect from the property, you will not only ensure the deal but will also win from the leverage.
• Invest in non-attractive land and turn it into attractive (high risk). Typically you can buy agricultural land pretty cheap. If you change the lands proposition – into land for building residential or commercial properties – you can sell it at several times better price. You will need just pocket money for the down payment of a small piece agricultural land. The big risk comes from the fact that there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to change the land’s proposition.

Those are enough for now. There is a lot more to talk about real estate investing and why it remains a huge opportunity if you are willing to think, risk and sometimes work. As usual, the low market time is the best to buy – and it seems right now the prices of real estate are dropping all over the world. So, it’s perfect for shark investors.

Have you ever flip-flopped a property?

I keep digging for managed forex accounts again and again. And here is what I came up with this time. This one has sweet low minimum but nonetheless carries sweet risk.

FX Master Managed Forex Account

Minimum investment: $4,000

Date of inception: January 2006

Average monthly ROI: around 7.5%. Who knows why the ROI is based on combination of live and demo accounts and not only on live accounts.

Largest drawdown: -2%

This managed account is very attractive, I am only worried about the past results. I’d like to see longer real performance. If someone has an older account with them, please share how close to the reality is this 7.5% ROI.

If you are willing to invest you can request LPOA forms at Striker FX. They also offer LPOAs for Devrim, reviewed here.