If you want to get into something that will totally confuse you and send you to the poor house at the same time then try getting into Forex trading which is the buying and selling of currency. An associate of mine has this horror story to share. For the sake of protecting his already fragile shattered ego because of this horrible experience we'll call him Joe.

"Hi, my name is Joe. I wanted to get into Forex trading or the buying and selling of currency. For example, buying Japanese Yen at one price and selling it at another price to make a profit. Sounds simple, but trust me, it is far from it.

For starters, if you know nothing about forex trading, you at least want to get some kind of an education about it that won't cost you anything. Therein lies the first problem. Try doing a search engine lookup on "what is forex trading" or "forex trading definition" and you'll find a zillion links to all these places that will teach you about forex trading, for a fee. So in other words before I can even learn about forex trading I have to invest money just to find out what it is? If that doesn't sound fishy to begin with.

Well, eventually I found enough of a definition of forex trading to know what it was and what it involved. The next problem was how to get into it. Do I go to an online broker? Which one? So I did another Internet search. Let me tell you, there are more places online that will be more than happy to take your business so you can't possibly know which one to go to unless you know someone who knows someone.

Then, to compound the problem even more you run into these listings that talk about forex scams. Huh? I guess I shouldn't have been surprised but how can you run a forex scam? Well, let me clear that one up right now. A bogus company acts as a broker for your money. You buy your currency at whatever price and then what happens is the company essentially runs off with your money and closes their site down, opening it up someplace else. You're now out your investment. That's only one of many ways that companies are scamming people getting into forex trading, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Once you find a legitimate company there are all the complex strategies you have to learn. There's looking for exit and entrance signs. In other words certain indicators that supposedly tell you when to buy the currency and when to sell. This is, of course, all guess work as nobody can really predict what a currency is going to sell for at any given time. You know this is the case when you see web sites with the following advertisement, "Trade forex with up to 80% accurate forecasts." In other words 20% of the time I'm going to lose money. This is what they admit to. You know it's never that good.

But here's the worst part of forex trading and the thing that most people don't realize. The percentage that your purchase goes up before you sell is so minuscule that the only way to make any decent amount of money is to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. People who think they can invest $25 or even $250 are dreaming if they think they will make anything worth talking about. With that kind of investment we are talking about pennies in profit.

Bottom line. After everything I learned, which took me weeks of my time, I eventually ended up chucking the whole idea of forex trading. That's my horror story. Weeks of my valuable time wasted on something that I had no business getting into in the first place, given the poor rate of return and the possibility of being scammed.

So unless you have a lot of money to burn my suggestion is to stay away from forex trading. I just wish I knew that before I ever started."