Posted on by Joseph Wagdy

Financial education

I had no clue about how the financial world works till June 2017. I was a regular person who is content with his salary and thought that savings alone is the safest thing to do. So I had a budget for the family and I was saving monthly a portion of our income. This went on for years. This was the case till one day in June 2017 when my wife told me about the crazy grocery prices in Carrefour. In that evening, she told me the price of 1KG ( 2.2 pounds) of tomatoes jumped to 12 AED (approx. 3.3 US$) and that hit me because a few days earlier the same 1KG price was below 6 AED (1.63 US$). That price difference shock me and made me determined to know and understand what is going with the prices and why – on the long run -prices go up and never come down.

This lead me to come across the following people who helped me a great deal understand the ugly face of today’s financial system. Those people are

  1. Mike Maloney
    1. I honestly urge you to watch his produced episodes titled Hidden Secrets of Money
  2. James Rickards
    1. Watch his interview with London Real published in 2017 on YouTube titled The Road to Ruin
    2. Watch his interview with London Real published in 2019 on YouTube titled PROJECT PROPHESY: Does This Government “Secret” Affect You?
    3. Watch his interview with Grant Williams published in 2019 on YouTube titled Predicting the Currency War and the Case For Gold
    4. if you love reading, then read his books.
  3. George Gammon
    1. Follow him on Twitter
    2. Follow his YouTube channel and watch his 3-step videos to educate your self on how deep the rabbit hole goes.
  4. Brent Johnson
    1. Follow him on Twitter
    2. Watch his The Dollar Milkshake Theory video on YouTube
  5. Peter Schiff
    1. Follow him on Twitter
  6. Harry S. Dent
    1. Follow him on Twitter
    2. His book The Demographic Cliff is a must read. The book is available on Amazon.com
  7. Dr. Chris Martenson on the impact of pandemics on economy
    1. Follow him on Twitter
    2. Follow his YouTube channel

To understand the system farther, both me and my wife decided to venture into online trading. We opened an account with Plus500 in July 2017. We deposited 11500 AED using part of our savings and traded only Gold, Silver and Bitcoin. This went on for several months till I discovered the ugly face of online trading. Our investment grew to nearly 30K AED. Later when I decided not to listen to my inner voice and ventured into the S&P500, we lost around 9K AED. Though over all we were successful, we didn’t like what we discovered in the derivatives markets. It is totally immoral and not ethical. We reached the conclusion that it is worse than gambling. For example, in a Las Vegas casino – by law – the casino must have cash equal in value to the amount of chips on the gambling floor. This isn’t the case in the derivative market. When you buy Gold, Sliver or anything else, you don’t really buy the real thing and rather a claim on that ounce which has been sold to several other people at the same time. This is why I say it is worse than gambling. We decided to cash our 22K AED and leave this trading thing by Sep 2017 and never do it again.