Greg Secker is a yeti-like man with the mien of a Marbella nightclub owner. He’s also very good at trading forex. So good that he does it on helicopters, ski slopes, and from his garden. And every day he manages to finish in the black. It’s all very impressive, flashy, and Instagrammer in Dubai-chique. Or is it?
Like the prime-of-prime piece published on this site a month ago, it’s probably not going to come as a shock to readers that some of Big G’s claims about his trading skills aren’t entirely accurate. What’s more amazing is that it’s still going on.
For years now, this person’s adverts have blared out at me from YouTube and across the internet. And all it takes is about one minute of Googling to show that what he’s saying is total bullshit.
For example, let’s look at the first block of text that appears when you click through on a YouTube ad from one of Big G’s companies, Learn to Trade.
Now if I came to you and said that I had…
- Worked at a bank
- Acquired professional trading skills while working at the bank
You’d probably assume that my job in the bank involved trading. And if I was putting that on my CV as a way of marketing a trading course, I would probably be trying to give the impression I had been on a trading team and was going to impart some of the knowledge I had acquired as a part of that team.
So did Greg Secker work on the trading team at what is now BNY Mellon? No he didn’t. He worked on an IT desk and you’d be crazy to think he was trying to give the impression he did anything else.
This is a common theme. Watching Big G’s videos is a great lesson in how to strongly imply something without ever explicitly saying it. For example:
- You could make £150,000 a year trading forex
- You could do this by only trading for about 5 minutes a day
Or to use the words of someone teaching at a seminar hosted by Greggy’s company:
“[This course] is for anyone who is seriously looking to increase their income by an extra grand a week so that they can leave their job, so that they can become financially independent and send the kids to private school next year.”
Notice that the course does not necessarily help them do these things, it just happens to be for people “looking” to leave their job or make an extra grand a week.
Why is this done? Because claiming these things as facts would be fraud. Smart!
The marketing grey zone
Ok, so maybe I’m being overly harsh in singling out Greggy Secks. But that’s because:
- Every time I write about him, someone from Capital Index writes me hate mail and I want to see if it happens again.
- I get his ads far more than any other forex/crypto faux millionaire internet person.
- He’s an even worse charlatan than others as he not only sells rubbish courses and crap software but then gets people to trade with a company he owns, Capital Index, so ‘customers’ (victims) lose money to him every step of the way.
The other thing I’ve never figured out is how he is able to set this up legally. Clearly no one who works at an FCA regulated company could say the sort of stuff he does in their marketing materials or sales calls to attract customers.
Affiliates may be able to but then…can you be an affiliate if you own the company you are referring people to? My guess is that it’s possible because…
- A combination of legal nitpicking + the techniques described above combine to make it technically acceptable.
- Regulatory and legal authorities don’t really care and don’t even get what’s going on.
- Some combination of both those points.
Whatever the case, and as much as I’m ragging on him, is what Greg Secker does so different from other people selling a service? Call me sceptical but I don’t really believe that Usain Bolt is trading cable every day with AvaTrade or that Jose Mourinho is making big bucks shorting Tesla CFDs on XTB.
Incidentally, it is one thing to acknowledge that this is the case and quite another to actually see it in person. A couple of weeks ago, I went to an event with a friend who runs an affiliate management agency for fashion brands. It’s pretty jarring to see how little the affiliates really care about the products they’re selling in real life versus knowing it in theory.
But then where do you draw the line with this stuff? Ethically it’s hard to do it but it’s even trickier from a regulatory point of view. For instance, should you only be able to market a product if you actually use it yourself? Arguably but that would probably put 99% of marketers out of work within a couple of weeks.
On the other hand, there is a distinction to be made between an affiliate and an advertiser. If you see Mourinho in an XTB advert it’s memorable and probably gives the company’s brand a level of prestige and trust among prospective consumers.
But Mourinho, as far as I’m aware, is not posting pictures of himself in front of rented Lamborghinis on Instagram, telling people he makes £100,000 a month trading forex, getting them to sign up to the offshore entity of some dodgy broker, and then taking a commission from each trade they place.
The difference is one of perception and purpose. People see an advert with someone like Mourinho and probably know implicitly that he doesn’t actually use the product. The ad is more about trust and brand building.
In contrast, an affiliate’s goal is to make it seem as though they do use the product, often in a very specific way, and get potential customers to do the same. An advert is not going to guide you through the sign up process, specifically tell you to sign up to an offshore entity, and then ask you to deposit a minimum amount of cash, as many affiliates for CFD providers do.
Are affiliates going to get banned?
The reason all of this is the subject of this week’s post is because of some news that came in from the UK advertising regulator a few days ago. From October, celebrities and social media types will be banned from appearing in ads for gambling companies. My understanding is that this also applies to social media affiliates on sites like Instagram.
I have no idea if this is going to happen in the FX/CFDs sector but it really wouldn’t be that surprising if it did. For instance, BDSwiss has been banned from offering services to UK customers because of the absolute charlatans it was using as affiliates to attract customers here.
The FCA also opened a consultation on “strengthening financial promotion rules for high risk investments” at the start of this year. Part of that includes a proposed ban on inducements to trade, which could make life hard for affiliates.
Reading that document you also just get the sense that the FCA is not a big fan of affiliates, even if it doesn’t say explicitly that it’s going to ban them. Things like the BDSwiss ban make that clear too.
On one level I can understand this. There is no way that someone working at IG Group in London, for example, could phone up a new client and start talking about how they make millions of pounds trading FX for five minutes each day. But this is exactly what affiliates do. And given affiliates are effectively working for those businesses, why should that disparity be allowed?
On the other hand, affiliates work so well because they sell products that their followers, whoever they may be, are more likely to be interested in than blanket adverts. Some may abuse this position but many don’t.
Any FCA or ESMA-backed ban on affiliates probably wouldn’t make such a difference to companies, given that many of them are already just contracting them with their offshore entities. Although brokers should keep in mind that this is what BDSwiss was doing and it didn’t work out well for them.
I suppose if the regulator doesn’t ban affiliates then companies should look to work with those that don’t behave like idiots or fraudulently. This should mean you get better quality customers that will also be longer lasting.
Alternatively, if the only way you can make money is by using fake millionaire idiot affiliates who can only attract clients by lying to them, maybe you should question what sort of business you are really running?
Have a good week everyone.
Stuff that happened:
Tickmill added more stock CFDs