by B. B. James

Created on: January 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 17, 2007

Are you guys serious? Earning a million dollars without investing a cent? Earning a million dollars in a month, starting from zero? What are you smoking? All the get-rich-quick schemes on the Web are scams and fakes - everybody knows that, or should know it.

Every once in a while, there's a market imbalance that allows people with foresight or luck to make above-average profits for a little while, but those windows close very fast. Example: People in Miami in 2003-04 were buying condos under construction, making the downpayment, and then selling the condos for big profits before they were even finished (and thus before payment was due). So you could put down maybe $20,000 for 6 months and then get back your $20,000 and another $40,000 or something - because another sucker came and bought the condo and hoped to flip it again to another sucker in 6 more months. But here are the lessons. First, you had to have money and decent credit to buy the condo. Second, you didn't make $1 million. Third, the window closed quickly. Fourth, if you timed it wrong, you got stuck with a condo that you couldn't make the mortgage on.

Other examples: if you foresaw the runup in oil prices 2 years ago, you could have cheaply bought options; but some very smart guys on Wall Street though they saw the same thing coming in natural gas, and their bet was so wrong that they buried a $3 billion hedge fund last year. Or, if you knew that Google's share price would continue to go beyond all bounds of reason, then buying it at even its initial, iflated price would have enabled you to double or triple your money. But I'd be pretty nervous to buy Google shares now.

Don't think that you can set up a Website and start printing money. Internet gambling, which is one idea I've seen floated in these articles, is now under dire pressure. The US govt. is arresting people who have legitimate Internet gambling sites because US law changed in 2006 to disallow the transfer of money for Internet gambling. Yup, it's illegal. How about selling stuff on eBay? Why don't you ask people who do it very successfully? They would answer that they sell a lot of stuff at very low margins. And they work their butts off for a long time to fill orders, until they get big enough that they can hire somebody else at minimum wage to do the packing and shipping. They make a living, but it ain't get-rich-quick.

So, is it impossible to get rich? Of course not - we read examples all the time. But these are folks who have great ideas, incredible commitment, and stick it out until they are in the right place at the right time. Then they look like "overnight" successes, even though they've sweated for years and years and years.

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