Hello all!
I haven’t been on here in ages, missed you all, hope everyone is doing well!
I’ve been searching for a trading shop to work with that has quality training, and FX is quite undeserved in that regard - it seems this space is crowded with equities.
I did some research on this one firm called the Apiary Fund (formerly Boulder Capital Management). Their deal is this:
$1000 training fee (an extra $300 gets you tax advice)
$97 a month desk fee
3-4 month review period where you attend their trading webinars, get feedback from their traders, and trade in demo with their platform.
After that, if they agree they give you a $2500 account with a 60% payout (50:1 leverage). That goes on for about 3 months, and then if you do well they increase your margin and payout progressively to a maximum of $250K and 85%.
To see how financially feasible this was, I did a financial model on the expected income you could get.
Here were my assumptions:
A. You train for 3 months in demo mode and get greenlighted to start with cash at the end of that period (they say if you have trading experience that can be done in 1-2 months, but I’m giving latitude for market conditions).
B. You trade with the $2500 account and 60% payout for 3 months.
C. You get upgraded at the end of that to a $5,000 account and 70% payout for 2 months, then $10K with 70% for 2 more months, then $25,000 for the last 2 months with 70% payout. This is based on their PPT presentation’s milestones which you can also see on the website, the time frames were my best guesses.
D. Your average monthly return is 20% (they use 40% as a target in their promotional material, but that is definitely not within statistical expectation I’d say).
E. Tax rate of 25% for FX trading.
F. Desk fee of $97 a month beginning with month 1.
Without the $300 tax advice package, I came with a total projected net income after taxes of $7,420. You can double that amount if you are more aggressive in your assumptions about how quickly they upgrade you (you can also be pretty sure that they won’t get you to the $250K level in one year, lol).
I disliked the moderate sales pressure tactics during the webinar, though they were not exactly boiler room. During the question and answer period a few people were saying they don’t have the money right now, to which the salesman replied:
“For those of you who are letting me know that you don’t have the money, I gotta tell you that’s a cop-out because you sat with me through a whole hour presentation where I told you up front that it was going to be $1295, and for you to tell me right now that you have the money when I was telling you up front what it was going to cost you, this is just a waste of your time, okay? And if you choose to waste your time that way I certainly understand…” Then he quickly chilled out and started the whole “maybe its not for you and that’s okay” thing.
Then also, he dropped the typical trading arcade bit that goes “We have 20 seats we have to fill this week, our money is waiting to be put to work”.
Finally, a big theme throughout the whole process was “our risk management software”, which was pitched as this magical thing that helps you make more money (a great way for them to justify cutting you down in size).
I was curious if anybody has any experience with them?