Yapping About Betting and the 2024 U.S. Elections

The 2024 US elections remind me two hard lessons that I learned coincidentally this first week of November in 2016 (Trump vs. Hillary) and in 2020 (Trump vs. Biden) both at the eve of election days back when I was a passionate, but disillusioned day trader.

Flashback to 2016. I had just started some lessons on forex trading through a local trainer that September. And instead of being patient and learning the ropes before going into live trading, I wanted to start making profit immediately while still a student. The thing is, in early September 2016, I had lost a job that I mistakenly held too close to my heart and the whole experience of losing it broke my heart to pieces. I didn’t realize how no longer having a place called an office to go to every day and no longer having colleagues around whom I had consider as close friends could make me almost sink into depression.

To compensate for that loss of purpose, loss of dignity, and loss of a stable income and financial security, I decided to use my severance to enroll for the training and make day trading my daily job. A bad idea. And by election day on the first Tuesday of November 2016, I was ready to cash in on the volatility of a Hillary win. Yep. I lost almost all my money to the forex trading market by 8 a.m. East African Time of the morning of Trump’s victory as the market reacted positively instead of the opposite. The rest is history.

Fast forward, I left and came back to day trading and my trainer introduced us to a guy on Facebook he followed who used to give free forex signals of the week for the biggest moves expected. He was the best teacher on trading I ever met (better than my trainer as I would later discover) and I followed him religiously and took notes every week for years to follow. He had a good grasp of the short-term market trends and with patience (and a lot of capital) I discovered that his signals were right 8 out of 10 times.

The biggest disadvantage as I later discovered was that he was preaching to big money traders who had a lot else going for them and could afford to place a trade and forget about it for a week or even a month and expect to make a profit. On the other hand, I needed the money to pay rent and other bills, I didn’t have any other activities to keep me occupied, and so I was very impatiently monitoring the trading platform from Monday to Friday. And combined with my little capital, I could make or sustain any meaningful profit.

I followed this pro trader up until 2020 right around the time of the pandemic-themed U.S. elections when Trump was fighting for his re-election against the current President Joe Biden. And in November, the pro trader sent a rare post during the last weekend before election day. He never used to send signals except on Mondays only and other rare occasions. I quickly opened the post and in it I was shocked that he was advertising for his followers to make prediction of the U.S. elections and giving his followers a chance to bet! What?! And on top of that, he was convincing his followers to bet on a Trump victory that week.

To justify himself he was using poll numbers by Rasmussen, which is a conservative polling company. Being a keen follower of U.S. politics, at this point, even before the elections, I knew that Mr. Trump would lose to Joe Biden. And here was someone I had followed like a disciple following a master for four years, misleading his followers in broad daylight.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. What was that? That forex trading is actually gambling! Forex trading is actually all about betting on gold to rise to the US dollar this week and the Yen to fall to the Euro, etc. Traders don’t sway the market, but are all like spectators waiting to see whether they will be lucky. Ever since I discovered forex trading in 2010, I had not seen it that way before. That this wealthy, experienced trader was in fact just a gambler. And to make it worse, he was probably misleading his followers to bet on Trump only for him to cash in by betting on Biden.

I honestly felt cheated. First thing I did was to reply to his post. I still couldn’t believe he was a professional gambler and misleading his followers to lose money by betting on Trump. And on the reply section, I wrote a long, long, long commentary giving evidence on why I thought he was wrong and why Trump was going to lose. Send!

A couple of hours later, I went back to check my comment and I was not surprised to find it had been published among many below his post but had been reduced to two paragraphs out of probably six or seven paragraphs. But needless to say, my relationship with the pro trader ended around that November 2020 period.

As for forex trading, I still dabbled with it a year later and still lost a lot of money despite knowing that it was a fancy name for gambling that you will not hear loud enough as many will not admit it. I have since grown to value doing my own research before making major investment decisions. It was not difficult to believe the predictions since it came from such a credible voice, but I can only imagine how many lost their money because of his advice.

He has since left Facebook (looked for him a couple of months ago after a long time) but I had unfollowed him already a few years ago.