Lately, I’ve found myself the target of numerous scammers, all offering tremendous returns from trading under their direction. As a professional trader, I can instantly identify these scams, but it’s occurred to me that many of my readers may not be so aware of their nature. In fact, one of my friends fell for one about a year ago. Even with my experience, I find the sales pitch compelling. I’m certain many people must be falling for them, or they would never make the effort to contact me at all.

This brief column is to give easy advice on how to avoid the trading scam. As an expert on trading, with over 25 years professional experience as a trader, I feel I’m qualified to help you avoid such scams.

Does the scam guarantee a return if you trade it? If it does, it is 100% a scam.

Is the return far greater than what the stock market returns (>7-8% per year)? Most scams want to entice the investor with giant returns. The most recent one targeting me had a 10-15% return per trade, with 5-6 trades per month, with 99% positive trades, since 2018. That means, if the owners of the strategy are not billionaires, they are the stupidest people alive. And they certainly don’t need your money, the money of a stranger. Or… it’s a scam. 100% a scam. Every time. You are being conned.

Does it have >90% accuracy in the trading (the trades are accurate and profitable >90% of the time)? This does not exist, at least not without taking insane risk like selling far out of the money options. Unless they tell you your money is at risk to be lost in its entirely some of the time, this is guaranteed a scam.

If a single one of the above questions has the answer “yes,” you don’t need to hear about the strategy. You don’t need to investigate for yourself. If these opportunities existed, the owners of these strategies would never be asking you for money. They would be carefully hiding their strategies while trading themselves, and raising capital. Just imagine you had a technique for picking winning lottery numbers that worked… would you consider selling this to complete strangers, for any price? Of course not. The person who reached out to you either originated the scam (most common) or has been taken in themselves (very rarely) and is advising you to join, unaware they are going to lose their money.

I encourage anyone to reach out to me and let me know of any opportunity that existed in the past or exists in the present that satisfied one of these conditions. I would love to hear of it. I will pay a $100 reward (I know, it’s small money, but at least it puts skin in the game) for anyone who can show me an investment strategy with a guaranteed return that returns >2X the return on a treasury bond, per year. Even the “risk free” rate of Treasuries is not truly risk free.

That’s the end of my public service announcement, I hope it helps.