The most honest binary option success story you will ever read

Ashley has some excellent advice for traders

One thing you quickly learn if you spend any time reading books about trading, is that the path to becoming an accomplished trader is littered with scams. So many of the titles I’ve read over the past few years talk about people falling victim to phoney signal services, trading systems, seminars and brokers. This seems to be a very real part of becoming a successful trader. People start off believing the hype,that they will get rich quick, and eventually they get sucked in and ripped off. Many quit, but a few carry on, knowing in their hearts that there is a way to make money from trading. Those who persevere eventually realize that the only way to succeed in trading is through very hard work, many many hours, and a dedication like they have never shown to anything else in the past.

Having gotten to the level where I now trade on a regular basis and am generally profiting from this thing, I’d like to tell my tale. For me binary options were the scam that I needed to stumble into on my way to becoming a moderately successful trader. No, I haven’t gotten rich from this thing, I don’t drive a supercar or own a yacht, this isn’t one of those stories, but I make a regular income and am slowly but surely improving my life. This is why I’m posting my story here as a binary options success story. I didn’t succeed at binary options. In fact I have a hard time believing that anyone ever has, but binary options were an important stepping stone to me becoming a legit trader. So this is in a weird way the most honest binary options success story you will ever read.

I got into binary options at the very beginning, shortly after brokers started offering these up or down trades to retail investors over the Internet. Binary options came around at exactly the time I was interested in finding out whether I could become an online trader. I had graduated from college a few years earlier, had found myself an uninspiring office job that paid my bills and my student loan, but I wasn’t happy with my prospects and I wanted to do more. As an Internet baby I had learned to be very very skeptical of online get rich quick schemes but when I started researching online trading, that’s when I really put myself out there to get mugged. One thing binary options brokers have managed to do better than almost anybody else out there is market themselves. I don’t know how much they spend on Internet marketing but their banners are everywhere, much more so than even Forex brokers I think, and it was the same story back then.

So I eventually signed up with a binary broker that will remain nameless, it’s the one you’re all thinking of, the one whose banners are still everywhere and is always being discussed on this site. One of their “senior brokers” quickly convinced me to put in almost everything I had into a binary options trading account. The guy was a real pro, charming, funny, friendly, managed to convince me that he was giving me special attention because I was like him and he wanted to help me. I feel so stupid saying this but it has to be done. It was almost as if he was flirting with me and I was such a sucker for it because he made me believe that I had finally found the person that was going to help me climb up the economic ladder. Incidentally this is a very important lesson, any time you think you’ve found “the one” (in any walk of life except perhaps marriage) please turn around and walk right away. The only way to get anywhere is on your own, these are the wisest words you will ever have shared with you. In any case the guy was really good at what he was doing and eventually had my initial deposit of 5000 US dollars up to around 7500. The guy just kept making me money. But the thing was he always managed to convince me not to withdraw it. Thinking about it now I feel like I must’ve been crazy, but I listened to him and he “compounded” my returns, making me more and more money but keeping it locked up in my account. Eventually he did let me withdraw 1500 but thinking of it now with a clear head, that was just to build my confidence in him even more, and it was much less than I’d deposited in the first place!!

His signals were pretty solid, he told me when to Call and when to Put, as well as how much to invest, he also explained why, from an economic point of view, the Dollar was about to drop against the Euro or the Yen against the Pound Sterling. Together we managed to build my balance up to around 12,000. Then he managed to convince me that we were moving up into the big leagues, that all I needed to do was invest another 3000 to bring me up to 15,000, and he was confident we would be able to double it within 6 months. What a fool was. I cleaned out the last 1000 I had in my account and took another two from my credit cards, piling the money in to this binary broker who had given me no reason to suspect him. Even the fact that he frowned on letting me pull money out was balanced out by the money I thought he was making me and the measly 1500 he let me have back. Anyway to cut the long story short the next three months was characterised by a series of “outlier events” that gradually ate into my profits. We ended up losing almost everything except another 500 he let me pull out at some point along the way. So all in all he took me for 6000 dollars, two of which I ended up having to pay back with interest to the credit card company.

It was a costly lesson, but one that set me on a path of discovery that led me to becoming, not an accomplished, but a pretty passable Forex trader. The thing that worked out so much in my favor was actually our lengthy talks. That lying cheat actually ended up teaching me a great deal about the currency markets, binary brokers talk about how you can trade all these different asset classes but most of their attention is on the major pairs, especially EUR/USD, just like most Forex traders focus on these same major pairs. Before I got mixed up with him I knew zero about the currency markets, about fundamental analysis, technical analysis, economic and technical indicators, time frames, Fibonacci sequences, NOTHING. But by the time he had finished taking me for all I had I had passively picked up quite a lot of quite useful knowledge. A lot of it was complete BS as well, this I started discovering as I began looking into the Forex markets on my own. Funnily enough this is what spurred me on. It was like having a silent evil teacher right there in the room with me and as I learnt more I began cutting into all the bullshit he had sold me. I remember the point at which I finally realised that I had learned more about trading than he even knew, it was a very weird moment. That’s when closed my open positions on my demo Forex account and finally opened a live trading account. It has been a long long road, and I only realised that I had been scammed AFTER I educated myself! All along I though he was a good guy and we’d just been unlucky.

So that’s my tale. Of course I can’t share all the things I’ve learned about trading with you here, but I can give you a few useful pointers.

1. Never accept bonuses, or even trade with a broker whose marketing focuses on bonuses. They are just clever ways to keep your deposits locked down so you can’t withdraw anything.
2. As far as online trading goes, Forex is the way to go, it’s the most liquid, has the most competition, and has cleaned up its act in the last few years. Yes it’s daunting at first, but it’s not rocket science, the best things in life are the things you work hard for, not the things that come for free.
3. When trading Forex don’t base everything on how small the spread of a broker is, or how little their commissions are, like bonuses these can be gimmicks to draw you in, instead look at their business model. Are they a dealing desk broker? Do they profit from your losses? If so why trust them?

My binary options success story was a shortcut by which I feel I avoided loosing a lot more money to other scam artists. If it were not for being ripped off by my binary options broker I may have been roped into a number of other scams before finding my way. Thanks to a phoney trading vehicle and a very charming bespectacled broker with transition lenses I found my own way and now I trade every day by myself, taking away small profits, but growing all the time.