FX Alert Service Review - Secret Forex Society / King Forex Signals

Don't be fooled, "Secret" & "King" are manipulative words that imply they have the Holy Grail of FX Trading

I was a Kingforexsignals subscriber for two weeks (which morphed into Secretforexsociety) and I decided not to continue with it.

There are a number of reasons that led me decide to opt out. Please note, my two weeks is not indicative of how successful Kingforexsignals has been in the past or will be in the future. The signal success rate was disappointing in that brief two week period (first two weeks of September 2006), but this wasn't why I left. See below.

There are two sides to the service, Rob's buy and sell signals during the London and New York trading sessions, plus Felix's so called "Secret News Service" which runs at significant economic news announcement times (usually 8:30am New York time). This is a text-based number displayed on the screen that shows how far an economic number has deviated from what was expected (such as GDP, NFP, etc.) If the deviation is big enough, then this becomes a buy or sell signal. Economic announcement deviations are the cause of the price spikes you occasionally see in currency cross rates.

To use this service you need to ensure you can monitor Rob's potential signals during his trading sessions. I couldn't afford that much time in front of the screen, even with the text-phone service, but this might not be a problem for others. I had to learn this by trying it. Because of my time constraints I didn't see all of Rob's calls, one that stood out for me however was a LONG call on GBP/USD on 12th September 2006, which was followed by a stop loss signal a few moments later. About twenty minutes later, the stop loss level was hit (that's fine, losses happen), but then Rob said he was still in the trade, and as Murphy's law would have it, the price started going LONG again. This pissed off a couple of people who then requested more information about when Rob exactly enters and exits his trades + someone asked why he wasn't following his own stop loss level. Another 10 minutes went by and the price started to drop again and Rob announced he was stopped out.

This isolated example highlighted the primary problem with Kingforexsignals for me: You are utterly dependent on someone else giving you signals based on his perception of market orders/depth (Rob has institutional-level access to FX orders). You have no way of verifying/confirming these signals, so you are committing money to trades on blind faith (albeit with some assurance that his signals have been good in the past). This style of trading doesn't help me achieve my goal of trading independently (learning to fish instead of being given a fish).

Subscribers in the room are frequently flamed by other devotees if they pose a legitimate question. In the above trade example (why didn't Rob follow his own stop loss level originally) this was flippantly answered by another member with "stop loss levels are a suggestion". In one sense this is true, but if you're paying so much money each month then people are expecting a little more certainty with the signals than that. People want to trust that they're being told the WHOLE truth, and not find out later that something else was going on. This is how results can be easily manipulated.

A word of warning, in the chatroom there's frequent course language and lots of posts with links to pornographic sites. This boring juvenile behavior made me feel like I was wasting my time. The most tedious part of the chatroom was the constant moaning about how bad all the FX brokers are. This got tired really quickly too.

At the time I left, Rob started saying he might need to restrict the chatter to just FX because of the hot-headed flaming and name calling between the members. This gives you a sense of how the chatter degenerated in the name of 'fun'.

I wouldn't recommend this service to beginners because you're not learning to develop a system for yourself which reflects your own perception of the market. To me this is a big drawback. If Rob gets hit by a bus, then what have you learned or can implement for yourself? Nothing, because you can't see the market depth and can't learn how to interpret it. I didn't really appreciate that this is all an alert service is, just buy and sell signals with little or no education.

Rob's signals might be worth trying if you have the time and want to augment an existing trading method that you already use since he lets you know when bids or offers are providing support/resistance levels in the current market action. This might be really useful for some.

The other part of this alert service is Felix's so called "Secret News Service". What he's trying to do is give you the economic number faster than you can get through other speedy news services, such as Bloomberg, Reuters, Trade the News and Need to Know News, etc. Being fast with the number is desirable so that you can get in early on those huge price spikes and get out quickly with a profit.

Unfortunately, most retail FX brokers either don't process your order quickly enough to take advantage of these news spikes or they widen the spread, thus either reducing your potential profit or increasing the risk of losing money on the trade.

Given the reality of how the retail FX broker platforms operate, in my opinion the speed of getting into the trade becomes far less important then knowing what the economic number is and getting in once the spread reduces or the platform starts accepting orders again (maybe after a minute or two). Big enough deviations in the economic numbers from what was expected will continue to move a currency pair in particular direction, so missing the initial spike doesn't mean you can't make a trade on news announcements.

For me, the high cost of getting the news just one or two seconds more quickly (and at times no faster) through kingforexsignals/secretforexsociety compared to other much cheaper news services just wasn't worth it. Why pay money for fast news if you can't use it?

Rob and Felix are well-intentioned guys and want to make their combined signal service work (my refund was swift). But if trusting someone else to give you your success is what you want, then this alert service might work for you. Personally, I think you'll have better long-term success trusting yourself.