In the mid-1990s I was on the board of directors of a new mutual fund that was designed to trade foreign currencies. I was asked to be on the board to supervise the trading, but we never got that far. Their basic strategy was to do something like the Max Yield Strategies (see Safe Strategies for Financial Freedom for how to do that) and the key emphasis was to convince regulators that this was a legitimate mutual fund product. However, the fund was born out of a Forex Trading company, rather than a mutual fund company and it didn't have big backing. It was done with a minimum of start up capital (like you might start a hedge fund) and that, along with a lack of worse case contingency planning, doomed it from the start. The fund probably started out with $500,000 and the accounting/auditing company was charging about $18,000 per month for auditing which was their MINIMUM charge for any mutual fund. And all these problems, unknown to me, existed when I agreed to be a director. Thus, most of our job as a board of directors was involved in winding the fund down and all the legal ramifications of that. It was a disaster.

I mentioned that in this post because suddenly I've been exposed to two sources of input about how to trade forex on the stock market. Steve Sjuggerud, in one of his great newsletters, has just recommended a mutual fund that's be around for a long time that basically does the max yield strategy. They must have been formed about the same time as the other fund only they planned better and were better capitalized when they started. They've earned double digit returns most years and have only had one losing year. See the January issue of True Wealth if you are interested.

But if you want to actually trade forex, Rydex has now introduced ETFs for that purpose. RIght now funds are available to trade the Aussie dollar (FXA), the British Pound (FXB), the Canadian Dollar (FXC), the Euro (FXE), the Swiss Franc (FXF), the Mexican Peso (FXM), the Swedish krona (FXS), and later this month the Japanese Yen (FXY). Notice the pattern to the symbols and they'll be easy to remember.

Anyway, despite the secular bear market, the stock market will not stop being the place to be because there are ETFs and funds available for you to invest in almost everything.