How to Avoid Bad Forex Signals Services and Providers
Please read this article very carefully, it can save you a lot of trouble, and wasted money. Whether you have previously subscribed to any forex signal services or not, especially if you have not, there are many things that you should be aware of. This article is an effort to educate you about the real dangers and traps related to subscribing to ANY signals-service. Never forget that, if you subscribe to untrustworthy or unreliable services, using the signals might cost you much more than the subscription itself. And don't be fooled by false performance reports, or artificially inflated results. Many tricks have been used by unreliable websites to lure people into subscribing to questionable services. Please read below about some of the common traps and tricks that are being used against you, so that you can then use your common sense and reason to recognise and avoid them.
1) ALWAYS demand a FREE trial. If a signals-provider does NOT offer a COMPLETELY FREE trial of their service, that's a big red flag right there. Let us explain why, in detail. If a signals-provider is trustworthy, and offers reliable and profitable signals (for any price), then the best thing they can do for themselves is to offer a limited-time FREE-subscription to everyone, so that when customers try the service and actually make money, the customers then become monthly subscribers for years (wouldn't you do the same?) On the other hand, why would a forex signals-provider NOT offer you a limited-time free subscription? Don't they want to make you a subscriber after all? The simple answer is that they can't give you the opportunity to test their service for free, because you will probably realise it is an untrustworthy service long before the free trial ends, and you will not pay the subscription. Most of their subscribers are victims that paid a subscription only to find out that they are better off rolling dice than following those signals. That means customers eventually end their subscriptions, but the websites have already made some profit, because you had to pay them in order to test them. Never fall into this trap, ever. And a final note about this: when we say FREE subscription, we do NOT mean those "PAY us now, but get a 30-day (imaginary) money-back guarantee" offers. That's NOT free. And half-price trials are not the same as free trials, because you still pay a considerable amount for a service you can't test otherwise. A true free trial subscription is one that requires no money at all, for AT LEAST A MONTH of FULL service, because very short free trials (like one or two weeks) will not give you enough time to test the service sufficiently, and you will then have to pay to continue testing. Final words: DEMAND A FREE TRIAL SUBSCRIPTION FOR AT LEAST 30 DAYS, and take your time to decide if the service is good enough for you. Don't accept any excuse or justification for not being offered a lengthy free trial, that's your life vest. Every day more and more clever excuses are being made up to not offer a free trial, don't fall for any of them. This is so important that you will see it mentioned a lot below too
2) Never rely on past-performance results shown on websites. Anyone can post any results, or use hidden tricks to inflate the results in case those are being checked by subscribers. It might actually be better to not even look at those as they are probably either false or inflated. We have found results that range from obvious lies to huge exaggerations, to inflated results, to unverifiable results, even to hypothetical and/or backtested-only results, all being presented as real, profitable signal results. Relying on any of those is much worse than relying on absolutely nothing. Don't forget the examples of signal-providers that closed their websites when their past performance was proven to be completely false. But these extreme cases are less dangerous (because they are more obvious) and can easily be avoided by most people. The real danger arises from believing well-disguised inflated results, results that could be real but are not. Many tricks have been used in the past, and are still being used to make false results appear real, or to make bad results appear good. One of many examples: we would never trust a service that offers a few signals for an amount A, more signals for a higher amount B, and maybe even more for an even higher amount C (especially without free trial). You might ask, why? The trick is well hidden: First, no matter which subscription you choose, they can claim much better results on their website than those you had, because you have not subscribed to all signals. That will make you wonder, maybe i need to pay even more for more signals, because otherwise I seem to get the low quality ones, or maybe I need both or all subscriptions to get those "fantastic" results. By the time you realise you chose a rogue provider, it is too late. And you will not even have proof of anything. And to make it worse, your actual cost might not be limited to the subscription if you have trusted the forex signals and took the trades. Other tricks include showing aggregated results like weekly profits or monthly profits, and not showing trade by trade results with screenshots and every detail. Or to publish results of real trades, but multiply pips by a position size that is not known in advance (thus being able to inflate the random good trades) and report inflated profits and deflated loses. There were cases of websites selling inflated results (promising forex signals) to unsuspected clients for years. Final words: No matter how real the past performance looks like on some website, it can be partially or completely faked, altered and/or inflated using one of many tricks. If you hear anything about months with average 1500+ pips profit, 15.000 pips per year, 500 pip per month guarantees "or your money back", or anything about no drawdowns or no negative months at all, run way as fast as you can. Never forget your life vest: Free trial for at least 30 days, or no deal. You must be able to see for yourself if the nice numbers on the website are even close to being real, before you pay the cost of a subscription.
3) Be careful with services that offer SMS alerts. SMS alerts are NOT bad, but signal services that depend on SMS alerts for fast trading, almost never work. Even if notified by SMS, and even if you carry a laptop with you at all times, you will still miss opportunities. But that's not the only problem. Many services that use SMS alerts use trading systems that depend a lot on a quick reaction to something that happened in the forex market. No matter how fast you are, the market will be ahead of you. We wouldn't like to receive an alert, only to see that the market moved 50 pips by the time we received the sms, which can frequently happen in a minute or less. Even a legitimate forex signal service can sometimes be ruined by relying too much on last minute SMS alerts, and even if your signals-provider is profitable, you might not be. On the other hand, these alerts are fine if they are combined with a trading style or strategy that notifies you about the planned trades many hours earlier, but then email alerts are just as useful. The better the strategy of your forex signals-provider is, the earlier you will be notified about the next trades, complete with exact entry, stop, and exit points of course, and the less it matters whether you get notified by SMS or email. Do NOT think you are dealing with a good company just because they are offering SMS alerts, anyone can do that today. Also, don't be tricked into believing you need the alerts in order to succeed, real professional profitable strategies have their entries and stops figured out many hours to days in advance, they are not based on super-fast reactions to the market, or anything that requires action right now like "robot" signals etc.
4) There were cases of websites that were very new, yet claimed to have been online for years or even more than a decade, and they showed completely false performance data, but still they were not easily recognisable by the newcomer. You might want to do a "whois" check on the domain to see if you can get any lies uncovered. To do that, use a free whois service and enter the website url of the provider, then click on "lookup" and on the next page click on "registration". If your forex providers claim to have been there for years but they are not, this will reveal it. This does not mean old providers are better, and it does NOT mean that if the provider passes this test then the signals are good, it ONLY means that if they lied for one thing, they might lie again anytime, and you should know what kind of people you are dealing with. Yes, there have been cases of completely rogue websites that aimed for some quick and easy profit and disappeared after a few months or even weeks. Again, don't forget your only true defence against scams and unreliable services, the FREE full trial of any service for at least 30 days.
5) Some people still believe that there might be some kind of company offering "black box" forex signals, "robot" or artificial intelligence signals, magical algorithm or other "mechanical" automated software signals. Of course there are, many of them. But not a single one is selling profitable forex signals. They just sell signals to unsuspecting new traders for profit, they don't trade their own signals, why should you do it? If you had developed one such system, what would you do? Sell subscriptions for a few hundred dollars each, or rent it to a huge financial institution for millions per month? Or maybe would you keep it for yourself and make even more money from the markets? Can you believe that someone is clever enough to develop a system like that but also foolish enough to let you use it for a few dollars? Don't waste your money, and more importantly your time with such things. Let alone the fact that all these are high-frequency trading systems, that will drain your account in record time. The only legitimate signals you will ever be able to find, are the result of human intelligence, knowledge, and experience, sold for additional profit. Traders can have many legitimate reasons to sell signals, including making additional money from subscriptions, but we have to work for each and every one of our trades, none of them is automated in any way. By the way, we wouldn't even trust trade-copier software that copies human-generated trades, let alone copying automated trades, especially without having the opportunity to get a free trial to test the system completely free. That's why we keep talking about the importance of free trials, because in our sector, unless you get one and use it appropriately, you might be looking for trouble.
6) If you see websites that use those premade, professional-looking stock-photography pictures of people that look like traders in some office, be suspicious. They are pretending to be a real company when they don't even have a proper real professional picture and they use stock-photography pictures instead. If you can't tell the difference between stock photography and real company pictures, don't worry too much, there is a ton of other stuff mentioned above already. Also, generally we would avoid websites that have lots of those little free applications or widgets with flashing forex prices and news etc on the front-page. They are desperately trying to look professional too, in a very unprofessional manner, because if they were professionals they wouldn't need to present irrelevant or useless information on their front-page. Their clients are paying for receiving trading signals, not the world's financial news and some delayed prices, but the inexperienced trader might not be alerted by the fact that some people try to look like professionals when they are not. Also, be careful of "registered with" banners, they can look very professional, but none of them offers any guarantee about the quality of signals, it's not their job to do that. Even real companies with offices and 100's of employees can sell unreliable signals, so you can't just trust a provider because they say "we are registered with...". Instead, ask for a completely free trial of at least 30 days to see for yourself what they can do for you. Sorry for mentioning that in every paragraph, but it is your only true defence against untrustworthy services.
7) Have you ever noticed that the more testimonials (whether text or video) you see on a site, the fewer the chances they are offering a completely FREE trial? Why do you think that is the case? With today's technology, it is very easy to make some fake video testimonials or other fancy videos, telling everyone how great your service is. But good results are hard to achieve, and free trials expose any bad results, so fake testimonials usually take their place. Not all sites with testimonials are bad, just be cautious, a great service doesn't need testimonials, even if they are real. Plus, if they wanted to show off they results, they could do it with a free trial instead.
8) There are a few more things you need to be aware of, or pay attention to. If your signals-provider claims to have hundreds of thousands of customers, run away. No, they don't have that many customers, with those subscription prices they would be multi-million-dollar enterprises, and they are obviously not. We wouldn't trust people making such false claims. If they have a "live chat" application on their website but it's always offline, that's also a red flag (trying to look like a company when they are not). Telephone numbers that don't exist, or ones that are always answered by answering machines, red flag. There have even been cases that the telephones were answered by pretending-to-be traders, but the service was totally unreliable. So, even human contact is no guarantee for performance or anything else at all. The only guarantee is to have a chance to see real results with a completely free trial subscription, before you even pay a single cent. Additionally, beware of sites offering life-time subscriptions for a one-time fee, because they probably don't plan on being around for too long. If they did, they would stick to the regular subscriptions and wouldn't offer a lifetime of service for the price of a few months of subscription. And if you see Google advertisements (especially lots of them) on a signals-service website, then something is not right. If you think about it, they are trading the financial markets, they are selling monthly subscriptions too, and then they are looking to make an extra $0.03 from advertisements? Your common sense can protect you, or can at least alert you to these situations. Also, if you see websites that look like one single extremely long page full of "proof" and reasons why you should buy anything including a signal service, that's a sales pitch, not a website, so protect yourself and run away. Or if you come across any meaningless guarantees, like "we guarantee more winners than losers" etc, be careful (ask yourself, what's the purpose of having more winners than losers, if the losers are huge, and the winners small?). These tricks are so obvious to an experienced trader, but to the newcomer they might not be.
We hope we helped open your eyes, and enabled you to recognise and avoid fraudulent or unreliable services. As you can see, there is a ton of stuff that can expose bad or unreliable providers, but the truth is you don't need a checklist like the above in order to filter out the bad providers. All you need is a lengthy FREE trial that respects these simple rules:
- 100% FREE Trial (no deposit, just free registration)
- At least 30 days (of free trial)
- Full service (no limitations during trial)
If you can get that, then you can take your time to evaluate the signal service, and only pay for it if it can really help you make money. Protect yourself, and use only profitable services.
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If you are a forex trader, or you are planning on becoming one, you will surely appreciate the information and the offers.
