As you may be aware if you subscribe to the free Business Opportunities Email Newsletter, I have recently started a spread betting experiment, resurrecting my account with Finspreads.

My last trading exploits ended disappointingly in early 2004 when I decided to cash out the 10% or so I had left of my capital.

However, I have been receiving both emails and text messages every morning from Finspreads ever since. They contain news and views on the trading day ahead as well as market prices.

To be completely honest, I almost never read them. I really should unsubscribe and have only stayed on the list as they are free…

For the first time though in over 3 years of getting these alerts, I got an email this afternoon from Sandy Jadeja about a:

“Possible Opportunity in December Gold”

Sandy Jadeja is a Chief Market Analyst according to the email, although it doesn’t state that it is for Finspreads.

His email states:

“I have been watching the December contract for Gold and noticed that it has risen 12.18% in just 23 trading sessions.However considering that the metal had declined 25% from its May $753 high to a low of $563 in October, the trend has clearly been down. With the recent short term rally of this low, Gold has traced out a corrective ABCD pattern right into resistance at $625 -30If this level holds the metal back then Gold may drop down to support at $613 or lower to $602. Otherwise a move higher may see Gold trade to its next resistance level at $642 -44"

On reading this email, I’m not too sure what he is trying to tell me. Is Gold going up or down?

Who knows…

If the trend is down, should I be short Gold now? I can tell you that I’m not.

A successful trader once wrote that a market is never too high to go higher and never too low to go lower (although if a market goes to zero it can’t go lower!)

All I know about Gold is that it is at around $621/oz as I write.

We will have to see how it goes from here but I have a feeling that Mr Jadeja is trying to tell me to go short on the December Gold contract. This contract expires on the 27th November so I will report back after trading has finished on that day.

Issue 11 of Iain Maitland’s Passive Income Newsletter arrived yesterday and, as usual, there were a couple of sales letters in the envelope with it.

First of all there was the small advert for the Driver’s Handbook:

“Drivers – Here’s the Insider Information the Police Don’t Want You to Have!”

Streetwise Publications have recently been pushing this in the National Press with huge, full page advertisements which I doubt are very cheap.

Second was an 8 page sales letter from Janine Stafford about self defence – selling a £97 DVD showing you how you can defend yourself from violent attack.

However, the third sales letter was my favourite because it’s a new product which is called

“How To Make £1,000 A Day Before Breakfast”

The letter is written by an ex-factory worker called Terry Wilson. I’ve never heard of him before but his story is quite interesting.

The sales letter explains that Terry was working one day, as usual, in his job at a car parts factory where he had worked for 23 years. His boss came by and made a flippant remark to him and he walked out.

Just like that, he’d had enough.

Anyway, the story goes that his wife is very, very mad at him and tells him to go and pick up his son from school the next day where he is helping with a car-boot sale.

When Terry gets there he finds a book which he buys for 25p.

This book reveals a remarkable “lost system” for creating cash. Terry’s research on Google finds that the book was used by someone in the 20s, a couple of people in the 30s, one person in the 40s and the book’s previous owner in the 50s and 60s.

All of them became fabulously rich from following the books teachings:

“How Two Words Scrawled in a Jumble-Sale Book Took Me From
Brush-Wielding Joke to Complete Financial Freedom in Just 180 Days!”

The remainder of the sales letter describes how Terry made £5,000 in his first month from the technique without any selling, with no staff or premises and without any start-up capital.

This system is apparently so good that Terry admits he would be “suicidal” if he made as little as £5,000 in a month nowadays.

As with all Streetwise’s products, there’s a lengthy guarantee period for this one – 90 Days. If I don’t think it’s worth at least 100 times the £39.95 I paid, I can return it for a full unconditional, no-questions-asked refund.

So, I have fallen for the sales letter. To tell you the truth I am intrigued about what it could be.

I’m guessing it’s some kind of “middle-man” opportunity where you use someone else’s money and goods or where you match up people with needs with people with products; something of that variety.

We’ll see.

Stay tuned.

At the end of May I heard about a new investment scheme called Fantastic Pay which sounded ridiculous and too good to be true.

Despite my complete conviction that this high yield investment program was probably a scam, I invested $25 as they promised a huge monthly payout if I kept my money invested for six months.

The deal was that if I invested $25 then they would pay me $50 a month every month forever. Surely, I thought, this is a load of crap but I figured $25 was not a great loss if it all went wrong.

I invested on the 25th May 2006 and, for a while, documented the progress on the site:

https://www.BizOppsUK.com/fantastic_pay.php

As you can see, I got bored and forgot about my investment in the middle of August but this last week I got an email with the subject line:

“FantasticPay has just sent $23.66 to your SafePay Solutions account”

It turns out that the owner of this HYIP scheme has decided to rebate everyone’s investment and so I got my $25 back (minus fees which SafePay took for processing).

According to the site I am still eligible for the monthly payouts too! Lucky I had faith then!

I’m in a pickle now – I am only a few dollars down as it stands but stand to pocket just short of $50 a month for no work.

Should I reinvest the monthly payouts or just pocket it until the scheme collapses? I think the latter…

In the meantime I have been reading around and Fantastic Pay have closed the doors to new members from the 6th October 2006. Maybe they were taking on new people for a “limited time only”…

I will keep you updated

Sunday morning’s presentation was given by John Taylor on the subject of testing and tracking.

John presented a lot of information over the 90 minutes or so he spoke.

His basic idea was to create content based sites – sites containing unique information based around three specific keywords.

You let the site run for a few weeks, gathering traffic by the normal methods, and then check your stats.

If you are receiving a lot of traffic, you can test different methods of monitising your site i.e. 1,000 hits with AdSense on the site and then 1,000 promoting an affiliate program.

The aim is to see which method earns you the most money and then stick with that method.

John also suggested using a rotator program to show 3 different webpages to visitors so that you can find the best converting page and concentrate on that.

The basic message was – Analyse Everything about your site or you will never know which content makes the most money.

John’s book, “Testing and Tracking” is available with several special bonuses at the following website:

https://www.Test-and-Track.co.uk

Go back a couple of months and I seemed to be on a “scam-busting” crusade.

First I wanted to stop people from getting sucked into the incredibly poor “Data Entry” and “Type at Home” schemes which were being advertised anywhere there was an internet marketing or work from home topic printed.

In relation to Data Entry Pro, I even wrote the following in the newsletter I freelance for:

“…the instructions are so poor and the scheme so mis-sold that you may find you lose a lot more than the cost of the opportunity…”

It must have been due to the massive refund rate for Data Entry Pro and its copy-cats but Clickbank pulled the plug on all of these “products” a month or so ago. Good ridance.

Whilst on my “crusade” I also did a whole load of research on the Prosperity Automated System which was introduced to the world by Mr Bill Osterhout. Most people could see that this particular scheme was just a money-go-round Pyramid Scheme where the vast majority of participants would lose thousands of dollars.

I thought it would collapse with the heavy hitters running off to leave everyone else with a negative bank balance.

However, the SEC in the US brought a stop to this particular pyramid scheme at the end of September. Of course, Osterhout has been stopped for the moment but there are similar schemes which have risen to continue in the same vein as PAS.

Let’s see how long these ones last…