I'm going to give my own background on this event. I trained with Joel at Learn Forex in Sacramento in 2002/2003. At that time, he and the owner of Learn Forex with other investors had just been bilked out of over a hundred thousand dollars from a FX broker in Seattle, Washington. It became what I thought as an impetous to establish a transperant managed FX investment fund that a group of us discussed while at Learn Forex. Joel had set up a professional trading room at his home and seemed sincerely dedicated to having integrity when he asked me to join him in his FX trading endeavors when he formed his LLC. The requirement was to have attended Learn Forex, and at the same time having been vetted by the instructors has being trustworthy - based on Christian ethics. When Joel asked me, I had been trading for FXCM and recently left (2003) because of the management trading and drawning down my assigned account; something that went against our agreement that stipulated that I was the sole trader on the account. I had been a student of Learn Forex since 2001 (and my FXCM manager was a graduate of Learn Forex - so go figure). There was always a discussion in the Learn Forex classes about finding FX brokers that had integrity/transperancy - and I was certainly one of those vetting Learn Forex and didn't find any corruption. There were plenty of war stories. At that time I compared most FX brokers to Oanda - a FX platform that my son introduced to me as he was studying economics at Oregon State University and was a staunch believer in having control over my investments instead of putting tens of thousands into a brokerage - even those recommended by Learn Forex. (Remember this was five years ago - almost the dark ages of online retail FX trading compared to today.) Consequently, I started my own due diligence and in the process discovered that there is not much integrity/transperancy in the retail FX business - and felt I was in the wilderness with this belief. Over the years, I've stayed to myself; trading and working on a fairly reliable system that I use today to trade a FX managed account. Last fall I read about Joel's arrest. I can't say one way or the other about his outcome, Learn Forex or what happened to those who were involved in the novice phase of my FX trading career. I feel that there are too many "insider"
market makers that corrupt the retail FX platforms that goes undedicted by inexperienced FX retail traders and/or is buried deep in the platform's network. I also find FX traders blaming brokerage platforms for their own mistakes. As well, over the past five years, you can learn how to trade the Forex Spot Market without paying a dime for classes. I always tell people not to pay thousands for classes. There is such a plethoria of online webinars/resources that it makes my own head spin when I learn that someone put down thousands to learn what they could have culled online for free. In this regard, people who put money into a Forex managed investment account have to do their own due diligence. The bottom line is caveat emptor; FX is not a sound investment strategy for the common masses. It's mass marketed to capture wanna be "traders" or those misguided souls thinking that FX is a sound investment strategy. Joel's FX investment management case is certainly something that got out of hand - but I had fortunately distanced myself with suspecting him of malfeance. Neither am I in defense of Joel nor condeming; as I know most people exaggerate the truth when it comes to telling people about their own trading profitability... simply to disguise or induce trusting people to invest in their trading fund simply to cover loses from previous clients, e.g. Joel. Perhaps Joel got caught in the same self-induced deceptive "merry-go-round" lie - that permeates throughout the capitalist milieu as the standard norm... and it finally caught up with him. I think it's just another example of how greedy people become when it comes to money i.e. Wall Street hedge fund managers selling subprime mortgages (sanctioned by the government by lifting the anti-predatory lending law of 1895 in 2003) to international banks ; plunging the global economy into a tailspin. Let me see, Joel goes to jail - financial institution CEO's and pirate hedge fund managers get multimillion dollar profits off of people's hard earn debt driven impoverishment. It seems to me the
Feds ought to be less discriminating with enforcing the law.
