Introduction
If you have ever shown any interest in forex trading on Facebook, for example, or subscribed to a few trading or business magazines, you may well have seen some advertisements for forex trading seminars that claim to be able to help you to become a profitable trader.
These training seminars will often be completely free to attend, so all you need to do is fill in a registration form, which obviously makes them sound very appealing.
However I think we all know that nothing is truly free in this world, and in this case, the catch is that you will usually be encouraged to pay for some kind of trading product or service at the end of the seminar.
So in this article I thought it would be a good idea to list all of the pros and cons of these free forex trading seminars to help you decide whether or not they are worth attending.
Pros
Free to Attend
The first benefit is that they will often be free to attend, and in a lot of cases they will be held at a convenient time and will take place in a large venue that is very easy to find.
Yes there will usually be some kind of sales pitch towards the end of the seminar, but you are under no obligation to pay for anything if you are not interested in any of the products or services that are being offered.
Useful Tips and Strategies
Another added benefit is that you will often pick up some useful trading tips and strategies that you can apply to your own trading if there is lots of valuable and educational content being provided in the presentations, particularly if the speakers trade the markets in real time and demonstrate how they make money.
Even if there is some kind of sales pitch during the seminar, if you can only pick up one useful tip from one of the speakers (or from one of your fellow attendees), it will still have been worth it.
Networking Opportunity
A lot of people who go to these seminars will be people who have no kind of trading experience whatsoever, or novice traders who have not yet been able to learn how to trade profitably. However there will usually be some people in the audience who are decent traders themselves.
So by attending these events, you can potentially make friends with these profitable traders, add them on Facebook, or take their contact details, for example, and pick up some useful tips from them or exchange ideas when you are both trading. Plus there will often be a chance to talk informally to some of the speakers as well.
Cons
Sales Pitch
The one major drawback of these free forex training seminars is that they have been designed to extract as much money as possible from the attendees. So the speakers will often spend lots of time gaining the trust of the audience by providing lots of useful content, before talking about the signal services that they offer, for instance, or the membership services that are available.
As mentioned above, this isn’t a problem if you actually learn something from the speakers or the attendees, but if you spend a whole day at one of these events and learn nothing new whatsoever, it will obviously have been a big waste of time.
Dubious Products and Services
Even if you attend one of these events and feel that you could potentially benefit from purchasing one of the products or services that are being offered by the speakers, you will often find that these services are not really that valuable or profitable in reality, and in some cases are outright scams.
For example, if it is a trading robot, it might only have been shown to be profitable on back-tested data, and any trading systems that are offered might prove to be useless once you actually try using them yourself, by which time you have already spent the $999, or however much you paid for the system.
You have to remember that if these products were that good, they would probably be using them to generate thousands of dollars in profits for themselves, and wouldn’t need to sell them to other people.
Final Thoughts
Despite the fact that many of these free forex trading seminars are essentially a long sales pitch for some kind of trading product or service, I wouldn’t discount them completely because they do still offer some useful nuggets of information, and as I mentioned above, if you can just pick up one useful tip each time, you will hopefully be on the path to becoming a more profitable trader as a result.
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