What you should do:

Re-organize your budget. You have to make sure that you have funds in your account to cover every check you write to avoid bouncing any checks.

Request substitute checks. You will not be entitled to a credit to your account if an error has been made unless you have a substitute check.

Balance your checkbook. If you are not in habit of balancing your checkbook with your bank statement each month, you need to start. This will ensure that you'll find any mistakes that may have been made.

Learn more. Consumer's Union did not support Check 21. Find out why and learn more about Check 21 HERE

How can you tell if track is in real time if they lie about it being in real time? This is not always easy but there are some basic tell tale signs. If it is a short term system that risks very little and trades often, say 10-50 times per month. Yet it has an 80-90% trade success ratio, which is almost impossible statistically. Most day traders and position traders are doing well if they are winning 40-50% of time. If they risk more and do not use tight stops, then win loss ratio goes up but size of drawdowns or size of largest loss has to go up. Longer term trader may have a slightly better win loss ratio but only if their risk is also larger. To make a general statement, larger win loss ratio is more I would be skeptical.

What if track record is a combination of partly historically back tested signals and partly real time signals. How should I analyze that? The first thing to look at is if win loss ratio has changed dramatically over track record time period. For example, if it is a 5 year time period, and promoter claims that trade signals went live 2 years ago yet win loss ratio changed dramatically only 6 months ago, beware. The hardest thing to detect on web is when you’re being conned about a hypothetical track record because there is no real way to tell when a web sites track record was edited deleted or revised. Some web sites use an independent tracking site but there are no real ways for a consumer to know other than that.

I hope that previous ideas will help to determine fact from fiction in world of investment newsletter promotions.