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The secret in real estate business is to use other people’s money. This is how most real estate tycoons are made. Unlike traditional residential real estate mortgages, real estate financing offers much broader financial options, including lending or financing from various financial institutions. Transactions like these call for above-average negotiation skills.

It’s not advisable to invest your own money in a real estate as for a few very important reasons. First, you you tend to give most of your profits away by not leveraging your investment. Second, real estate is a very risky business – you don’t want to jeopardize everything you have.

This is not to say that real estate investment is all about losses. On the contrary. if you know how to make money work for you, you may actually garner a great deal of money in return for your investment.

Here’s how:

If, for example, you purchase a $100,000 property that increases an average of 7 percent per year (in reality that number could be higher or lower), you would see a net profit from renting your property resulting in an approximately 15 percent return.

If you’re content with little return of investment, you might settle with your 15 percent return. But if you really want to earn on your investment, consider the possibility of what leveraging can do for you. At present, a typical real estate investor can find financing as high as 95 to 97 percent of the purchase price. There even some instances where you may be able to get a 100 percent financing but we won’t use this for our example as it’s an inadequate comparison.

So, if you’re are an investor who is already content with a smallreturn of investment then 15 percent sounds like a lot. But for those who really want to make it big in the real estate, 15 percent is far from being considered a noteworthy return.

How does leveraging work?

Let’s assume that the rental income will cover all your expenses, including the mortgage payments. Taking the same example, a 7 percent appreciation of your property results in a $7,000 profit per year. With a 95% financing in place, you’ll be able to get a $7,000 return on $5,000 (your 5 percent down payment on a $100,000 real estate property). This will provide you with a 140 percent return on your investment. Not only that, with the same $100,000 you can go out and purchase 20 investment properties, finance 95% percent of them, and make an amazing $140,000 profit a year. This totally beats the $15,000 profit with an all-cash transaction.

In terms of the additional 20 properties, expect to have a hard time getting financing for them since usually only five or six new rental property mortgages are the maximum that lenders presently allow. Which is why you need to have an above-average negotiation skills.

When I first became interested in trading Futures I had no idea as to where to go to get information about trading.  I didn’t know anyone that traded the Futures Market.  In fact when I talked to anyone about Futures all I heard was  “don’t trade Futures, it’s way too dangerous, you will lose everything you own”. Indeed you can lose money fast in the Futures market, but you can also make money fast because the leverage is fantastic and that’s what interested me.  I knew I had to have a good system, but where would I go to find one.

At that time brokers would send you information, and maybe they still do, from various Exchanges about different trading strategies and how one might use them in a particular Futures Market.  Well, this information looked pretty good!  All I had to do was get a charting service and I was on my way.

I guess I wasn’t as bright as the person that gathered the information for the booklets because I simply could not make these indicators work for me.  Surely someone was trading successfully using this information I thought, otherwise why would they publish the booklets. With this thought in mind I felt I just needed more information.

Books had to be the answer. Like I said previously, I guess I was not very bright because after reading thirty or forty books thoroughly, some two and three times, and having applied the techniques learned from the books, I was not able to trade profitably on a consistent basis. I’m sure some are capable of using these techniques to trade successfully, but I was not able to do so.  While having a book burning party a few years ago, I decided to keep one book to remind me of my experience.  It’s on my bookshelf and I glance at it once or twice a year to keep this experience fresh in my memory.  There may be some great books out there that show you how to trade successfully on a consistent basis, but unfortunately I never found one.  I wasted years on this endeavor.

By this time computer trading was getting popular. I received an advertisement about a program where I could actually write my own system and back test it to get results before actually trading it. Wow!  This was great and it was only $4,500.00.  They advertised anyone would be able to program this thing.  Well they must have meant anyone with the exception of me.  I wasted hundreds of hours trying to write programs unsuccessfully.  I didn’t know the program language and I wasn’t able to get enough information to learn it so I decided to be intelligent about this situation and bought another program at only half the price of the first one.  I was able to write a few programs that produced very well in back testing, if one could stand twenty point stops in the S&P. I really liked this idea but finally had to admit that it was not going to give me what I was searching for.

For years now I had been studying charts every single day plus weekends and evenings.Of course I was aware that all indicators, strategies, systems etc. started with price. None of these things can be made without price moving first.  Price can’t be wrong because it is what it is, therefore it is always right.  So I decided to put all of my energy into the study of charts, or price and its movement, and finally I found it.  It was right there in front of me all these years and I just didn’t see it.  After another year or so of perfecting entries and exits and how to read where price should go, and if it would continue on or turn at that point, I finally had a system.  This system will give you profits consistently. I found that price will tell you where it is going and where it is likely to turn, and if it doesn’t turn there it will tell you in advance that it will likely continue.

I had a hard time learning to trade without a mentor.  It actually took years of commitment, hard work, and a lot of wasted money.  If you are new to trading Futures, or any market, and you don’t have a mentor with a good system that will give you consistent profits, then by all means that should be your first endeavor.  It is said that 90 of everyone trading in the futures market loses.  Make sure you’re in the 5 that are winners.