Get Rich Quick

Ed Bowsher is intrigued by 'Get Rich Quick' seminars. Are they worth going to?

As our `The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' series continues, I'm going to look at `Get Rich Quick' seminars. I'd like to get rich. Quickly. So I've always been intrigued by emails promoting free seminars that will teach me how to make money fast. In fact, I've been so intrigued, I've attended seven such seminars - organised by a range of different companies. Some from the US, some based in the UK. Sadly, the seminars were all pretty much a waste of time. Here's how they work: You can make big money Often the `presenter' starts with a few snazzily presented graphs. One might show the share price for Microsoft in the 90s - the price went up a long way at a spritely pace back then. Another chart could be for Dell, which also delivered stratospheric returns in the run-up to 2000. Or maybe there's a squiggly line showing the upward march of Croatian property prices since the Balkan wars ended. Sometimes snatches of loud upbeat dance music are also played, just to make you even more excited. A bit of theory Those graphs look great in the PowerPoint presentation, but the presenter knows you might be thinking these are rare one-offs. So he says that you can make big money, too. Normally, he'll then run through a couple of stock-picking techniques, normally based on the study of share price charts - often known as `technical analysis' (TA). The Fool has always been pretty sceptical about TA. I share that scepticism, but I know there are plenty of professional and private investors who follow the approach. I suspect even the most ardent TA fans won't think that half an hour's study of chart patterns could deliver stunning gains of 40 or 50% a year. He's a normal guy The next step is to show that the presenter is just an ordinary guy. He'll show photos with his wife and kids or maybe his pet dog. Anything to show that he's just like you and me. He's made big money He's an ordinary guy - except he's made big money. Or he works for a guru that has made big money. And he's made it by following a simple money-making strategy. In order to prove his success, one guru showed a photo of his Florida mansion. I couldn't help wondering whether the real source of the man's wealth was running highly-priced courses that are marketed at the free seminar. A special price Then you hear about the `in depth' course that you could go on. Often they're for a weekend. The courses aren't cheap, but if you sign up for the course on the day of the free seminar, you'll be offered a big discount, perhaps 50%. I handed over the money I got carried away at one free seminar and paid up for a weekend course. In fairness, the information was well presented and I did learn a bit about TA. But I could have picked most of it up from a couple of basic books on stock price charting. And anyway, I'm still far from convinced that TA is the way to make money from stocks and shares. Get rich slowly At The Fool, we've always argued that the stock market is a great way to make money over the long term. There are years when stock markets tumble or move sideways but history suggests that shares normally do well over periods of ten years or longer. If you had invested £100 in UK shares at the end of 1990 and reinvested the dividends, your investment would have been worth £339 at the end of 2007. And those figures are after inflation has been removed. If you ignore inflation, the figure is £550. Not bad, eh? How to invest If you'd like to invest in the stock market, the simplest approach is to buy units in an index tracker fund. Put simply, if the FTSE 100 index rises 10%, then a FTSE 100 index tracker fund should deliver a gain of around 10%. Read more in An Easy Way To Invest In Shares. Or if you're more daring, you could invest directly in shares. Sign up for The Motley Fool Share Dealing Service and you could buy and sell shares with dealing charges of only £10 a trade. If you're tempted but would like to learn more before you take the plunge, read our guide to investing in individual shares. Whatever you do, good luck! *This article first appeared in an email.