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Risks of online investments

First and foremost you must understand that the reward is directly proportionate to the risk. That is what speculation is all about; you cannot expect to make a substantial return if you are not prepared to accept a certain amount of risk. Any experienced financial speculator will tell you that successful speculation involves being able to quantify risk. The amount of risk attached to any particular HYIP, is for the most part, unquantifiable.
Many of the genuine small Internet based HYIP's are considered high risk, as they are not particularly well thought out programs, often with no sound methodology from which to generate returns. They receive thousands of small deposits from participants, which only adds to the problem. The larger specialist programs, many of which are not plugged on the Internet, can be much safer in many respects, as they are usually run by professional traders who know how to generate returns using sound trading methods. They keep a low profile due to the risk of interference by some authorities, but this does not mean that they are not genuine investment programs.

There is yet another type of HYIP trading program which allows you to set up your own offshore company and a bank account, the funds are then traded through this account, but the program administrator and/or trader never has any kind of access to your funds, he/she only has the authority to place the trades on the account. This method of funding is without a doubt the safest that is available to the HYIP investor. The only risk is that which is attached to the trading method used to generate the returns, although most professional traders will operate with specific risk parameters in mind.

The program administrators should also be forthcoming about how they intend to generate the quoted returns. You should be extremely wary dealing with any HYIP that refuses to disclose details about their system, after all they are asking you to show good faith in them by investing your hard earned money, so they should at least be willing to tell you how they intend to generate the quoted returns. Once you know how a program works, you are in a much better position to be able to assess the viability of that program. For example there is one HYIP that claims very high returns from investing in domain names. This type of HYIP might have been feasible a few years ago, but is highly unlikely to be profitable these days. There have been many high profile court rulings against domain name speculators over the last few years, and registering domain names is hardly an area that requires specialist knowledge and expertise.

As a rule the larger the sum of the investment the safer the program is likely to be, assuming that you are afforded adequate capital security. The frauds are usually the ones that request small investments and membership fees, as well as offering referral fee arrangements. Programs operating in this manner can draw in a greater number of participants in a short time before shutting down. The larger programs tend to be much more professional, with their focus on making steady returns for investors and taking a small part of those returns as their profit. Most of the larger programs also appear to understand the need for frequent client communications, which is often an area of complaint amongst many of the smaller HYIP's. Usually your only source of regular information is the HYIP website (assuming they have one), and in many cases these websites are not updated as frequently as they should be.