I listened to Apiary Fund's online web information session. Here's basically the scoop:
1. It's a remote FX trading arcade. They say that if you work up a track record with them you can manage up to $250K of capital.
2. The basic deal is you pay $1000 for training plus a $97 a month platform fee. You demo trade for at least a month and then they give you a little capital (like $2500), then they increase you size as you do better. They cut your capital if you screw up.
3. There is no one style, you do whatever works. You have access to their trading room where you get to watch their main guy day trade EUR/USD off 1 and 5 minute charts.
4. You have to pay the $97 platform fee every month no matter what.
The general impression I got was that it was a sucker's bet, because the sales pitch was pretty tough. During the info session I heard a very boiler-room type of comment: "You listened to this webinar for half an hour where you were told up front there was a $1000 cost of coming into this program, so if you're telling me that you can't afford it that's sounding like a cop-out".
Also, they take down your contact info and then they called me once a week for over a month. Once it was pretty amusing because they called me up, got my voicemail, and forgot to hang up. I heard their sales force chatting with each other, and one was saying 'I couldn't figure out if this guy had money or not, whatever his deal is...'.
If you do the math, it basically comes down to paying a $1097 option premium plus a continual fixed swap of $97 a month thereafter for the option to manage several thousand dollars of FX capital with a maximum upside of $250,000 with an 85% payout (and naturally that payoff won't happen right away).
So if you do the math, figure they probably sign up a new person each day, and that works out to 30 a month times $1087, or $32,910 a month ($394,920 a year in total revenue). Then there's the gravy off platform fees and the few traders who manage to pull a profit net of the losers that mess with the small $2500 account. Not a bad deal for them, but is it a good deal for you? I think not.
