I’ve been on the road my whole working life. I started my work as a door-to-door salesman in London, selling office supplies in the freezing cold. However cold I was though, my leads were even colder. I don’t know if it was my desire to stay longer in a warm store or my commission, but after a few years in that job I got right good at selling.
I managed to find work later as a printer salesman working warm leads, and then as a sales manager for a local tractor manufacturing outfit, using my experience in office supplies as leverage into the position.
Working for a company with big, complicated machines required of me a lot of technical know-how. There, I learned about the scrutiny placed on businesses with complicated functions, about regulation and about staying within legal standards.
I won’t bore my loyal readers about how I ended up selling airplane engines, but I will say that my preference for working for companies under strict regulation ended up being quite comforting for me. Knowledge that my canvas had a limited size, you could say, helped me be confident in the product I was selling. After brokering my first big deal with a major military manufacturer, I retired and settled into my cottage.
Life was good, until I got bored. I was itching for something challenging that would allow me to use the money that I was letting collect dust in a savings account. I was never really watching my own finances. I knew I had money, but never bothered to try and grow it, being on the road didn’t leave time for much else. I met a mate of mine from my last job before retirement, and he seemed to be much better-off than I was, which surprised me considering I was always at the top of the sales charts.
He explained to me that his success came from actively investing his money. His outlook was that retirement at such a young age would be boring, and that he wanted to “half-retire”.
While I spent time sleeping next to a fishing reel, he was fully educating himself into one day becoming his own financial manager. After a year of reading books, watching videos and testing his strategies over the span of months at a time, he began trading foreign currencies, or Forex.
I’ve heard some not-no-savory things about Forex on the rare occasions it was mentioned around me, that it was an unregulated mess; a bedlam of trading. I was intrigued, but voiced my concerns to him.
“My broker is regulated, Craig! You think in this day and age a company would handle millions of dollars a day in transactions without a little accountability? Pah.”
He said his broker was something called Alvexo. I looked it up that night, and learned why Frank had become so successful. Alvexo is regulated by CySEC, which means they fall under all kinds of provisions set up by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission.
So I decided to try out their demo account
Great, so…following Frank’s example was still something I was hesitant of, despite my boredom and newfound worry for my long term financial portrait. But then I discovered that Alvexo has a truly surprising amount of educational videos on Forex, from the most basic concepts to advanced strategies that I couldn’t even decipher the titles of.
So I decided to try out their demo account, read their free eBook, watch some of the videos and…take it easy. I wasn’t going to jump into something so fast. So I began with the eBook, and I was surprised at how much I understood on the first read. The concept of how the values of different currencies change based on what seems like only economic news (most of which I read every morning anyway) intrigued me.
I began my regimen of training videos. I didn’t want to tell Frank I was doing this, it was still a bit embarrassing…but after 10 or so videos I decided to catch up with him over lunch and ask him some of the questions that I had.
Slowly, Forex became a daily activity for me, built into my muscle memory. I would check the news, read and watch videos on the latest strategies, set up some basic trades in my demo account and then go fishing.
It helped me feel like I was doing more with my life than just sitting around doing nothing, I was being productive. I was working on something, even though it wasn’t with real money.
After a few months of this, I got a ring from Frank out of the blue.
“So are you trading with real money yet, Craig?”
I knew my lingering fears on the legitimacy of forex as an avenue of extra income and investment were unfounded, and I began to invest into strategies I had grown comfortable with. I was scared at first. I couldn’t focus during my afternoon fishing, but when I got back to the house I discovered that nothing had changed. I still made money… but this time, it was real.