I have had lots of really bad financial advice in my life but the most recent one is worth noting.

I had set aside some money to invest into stocks. So opened an account with Internaxx bank and took out a cheap subscription under a special offer with the Porter Stansberry tipping sheet.

It was around 2010 and I did remarkably well, quickly building up a nice little portfolio and collecting dividends and watching as the values increased.

What could go wrong?

I had a phone call from some broker in the UK who specialised in pre IPO stocks and floatations so listened and the guy explained how using CFD’s you could leverage up your position and take control of a much bigger slice of the action and make a huge amount of money……..

I think some rich guy like Warren Buffet once said if you do not fully understand what you are investing in just give it a miss.

So a new account was opened and I started off making my fortune.

Well no, I ended up with a black hole which had these things called margin calls which gobbled up cash like there was no tomorrow.

I quickly realised that this was not working and bailed out pretty quickly but then got into leveraged trading on gold………

It was an interesting 6 months and taught me that I was not really understanding what was going on and I would never cut it as a trader so there was something positive at least.

The thing was it led me onto a much greater in depth understanding of markets and leverage and I started my forex business back in 2014 which has been very successful, you can read the story here.

Then once I had a handle on the maths I ended up as a pro horse tipster which I still do on a daily basis here.

Life is strange and sometimes even bad advice can be useful but on the strict understanding you learn from your mistakes which sadly many folks do not.