Facebook is huge, it has been around for many years now and is the most popular social network in the world right now. Due to its size, it is not a surprise that a trading community has been created around it. In fact, if you simply search for forex, there are hundreds and thousands of groups that come up, from all sorts of things, country specific forex groups, currency specific groups, educational groups, affiliate groups, and pretty much anything else that you can think of. With all of these groups and pages available, is Facebook actually useful when it comes to your trading education? That is what we are going to be looking at today.
The simple answer to this question is yes and no. Facebook has a whole wealth of information that is posted from its various members, but there is also a lot of false information being posted too. We are sure that you have heard of fake news, a phrase made famous by Donald Trump, the saying, unfortunately, has a lot of merits when it comes to Facebook too. While there is a lot of information there, we need to be careful as to what we decide to believe and what we don’t.
With so many different groups it can be hard to find the right ones, a lot of the groups are made up of people simply spamming their own services, with very little discussion about actual trading, or when someone does ask for help their post is simply drowned in the flood of otherwise useless posts from automated profiles and bots.
If however, you do manage to find a group that is good at weeding out the spam, and has an active user base, then you may have stumbled into a goldmine for things like feedback and trading ideas. When you have a group of people who have a similar mindset to yourself, then it is a fantastic opportunity to get some feedback on your own trading ideas, it also allows you to throw ideas about to get some pretty quick feedback from people who are in the same boat. These sorts of groups can help you to get confirmations of your ideas and also counter ideas, which could potentially help you avoid making some bad trades.
A problem with Facebook is that it has become the breeding ground for scams. Pretty much every group that you look at you see people advertising their mentorships, their trading signals, their huge returns on investments, and other various things. You need to remember that if something seems too good to be true, it most likely is, if someone is advertising that they can get you 0 a day for an investment of $10 then there’s probably something just a little fishy about that. The same goes for signals, if they are advertising 100% accurate signals, but you need to join their group or telegram channel in order to get them, then there are two things wrong, firstly no one has 100% accurate signals, and if someone is asking you to join their personal things especially off of Facebook then this should be a warning flag too.
If you do join a group, and you see people advertising their trading software, then this is actually not allowed anymore. Facebook classes all forex software as a “get rich quick” scheme which is now against their rules to advertise. So while there may be some legitimate software out there, it is best not to take the word of anyone on Facebook and certainly not to purchase something that was advertised within one of the groups.
Along with the groups, there are also Facebook pages, which are often from companies, some legitimate and some not but they also include a number of different trading education sites and companies. While they may not actually be offering their services on Facebook, it is a good opportunity for you to work out what different offerings out there are. But again, you need to be wary of the ones that are simply there to try and take your money rather than offering a true service.
So ultimately, Facebook does have a lot of useful information. The problem is that it is very hard to find the groups that are actually useful, with so many bots and scammers about it is a minefield for those that are not up to date on what they need to look out for. If You can find the right groups then it can certainly be helpful at getting feedback and replies from other real traders, but if you cannot, then it is probably best to look for your trading advice and education outside of Facebook on a more dedicated forum or website.