Óne sad but real story to share, that should be avoidable...

One of the recent scam from the team-trading, had caused Mr.A to be delinquented and bankrupted.

Team trading required plenty of trust among members. It was because of the fact that it involved money. When money is concerned, it is very important to know all the rest of the trading partners really longer enough, sometimes background check may be necessary. Just want to share how Mr.A got into trouble by joining one of those team-trading syndicate, and had actually make a lot of money initially. Everyone was happy and sharing the fruit of success. But one fine day, there was a huge loss incurred, and the so-called team leader had run away and left the poor guy behind to bear all the debts. Eventually, he had to declare bankrupted and then realized that those people that he ever traded with, had either been declared bankrupted or delinquent before, and they needed someone fresh to open "clean-record" accounts for large trading limit. That's why they formed trading team to recruit new faces. If they are any hiccups, they will first run away again and formed other teams else where, leaving this new member as victims. What these synidicates normally do involves purposely naked short counters or buying huge volume of shares and then leave open to force-selling. When there are so many of you trading together, many trading accounts can be opened to manipulate particular counters' share price.

The real money sometime comes from buy and hold a good stock, e.g. Warren Buffet... Singapore got a lot of rich guys that are actually "Warren Buffet" style, trust me. And if you really like equity, I suggest that you can plan your liquidities into 2 areas, (1) keeping some solid blue chips in your own name for value appreciation and (2) fork out only spare cash for speculation.

Stock Market is a place that full of opportunities but also traps that are meant to kill. Greed is most of the time that make you turn profit to loss. There is no short-cut to riches...as the saying goes, nobody will put $$$ into your pockets for free (e.g. research reports), there must be someone that will be the victims in this whole game. Internet-trading had brought convenience to whoever that wanted to trade, but also brought destruction to many novice investors. Behind the glamourous side of stock market, you will never know how many people had ever died for it.