Ralph Bechie

Ralph was keen in the financial markets and especially the currency exchange. He made a lot of money when the US dollar fell so rapidly after September 11, and he was trying to make the Forbes rich list this year or next .

His skills lay in predicting large market shifts that would affect a country s currency, like the downfall of a certain market sector from new government legislation, or the collapse of a large corporation. Because of this, Ralph spent all day at home, on the Internet, reading every piece of financial information he could find. His browser s bookmarks were pages long, and he relied totally on the Internet for all of his research.

He also used the Internet for all money trading and transactions. His favorite currency trading Web site, which he used for the majority of his money transactions, was www.moneymarkettrading.com, a relatively small new company that offered high quality service, low commissions, and good stable information backing each currency.

Ralph was planning, over the next two weeks, to trade up to $65 million of his total assets through this one financial portal; he had faith in the EURO and in its stability and growth. Ralph also had good reason to believe that if he invested now, the growth over even a one-week period would result in a 1 to 2 percent increase of net worth.

Ralph kept all of his money offshore. He had a total of nine offshore accounts, but the majority of his money was kept in Vanuatu. He often holidayed there and loved the country for its bright sun, long white sand beaches, and tax-free attitude toward life.

On Monday morning he began a wire transfer of $30 million from his Vanuatu account to his account at www.moneymarkettrading.com. His bank was great at sending wire transfers and it took only two days before the money was in his online account and ready for use. Thirty million USD bought roughly 24 million EURO. Ralph remembers the days where he used to think trading one million USD of his own money was a lot and it use to really scare him, but those days were long gone.

In fact, his largest transaction ever was over $70 million. It s all in a day s work, I guess, he thought to himself. It took only seconds to convert the millions to EURO online, and by the end of the day Ralph had a .2 percent increase already on his portfolio.

Over the next week he wired the rest of the money across in $20 to $30 million dollar lots. Once each transfer was completed, the money was converted to EURO and appended to his portfolio. By the end, he held just over 49 million EURO in his online account portfolio.

He waited for just the right time to withdraw his money. It had to be perfect since this was a rather large investment, and trading at the wrong time might cost him millions. When the time felt right he took the money out of his active portfolio and converted it back to US dollars ready for the wire transfer to its final destination, his savings account. Ralph had chosen Colombia for his savings and holding account, it was one of the few countries in the world that really didn t care about anything.

You could keep a few billion there without paying a cent of tax, and without anyone knowing about it. Ralph was hoping to take a vacation to Colombia later that year, buy a house, and move there for good. He was sick of Australia, the government was on a downward spiral and he found the market just too unstable for his own liking, plus he hated Australians and the terrible climate. Having finished with currency trading for a while, Ralph sent a wire transfer of his balance to his Colombian-based account at Banco Colpatria (Bank of Colombia).

The best thing about moneymarkettrading.com was their ease of sending money; they had no problems sending money to South America, even though Ralph was obviously trying to dodge local tax. This relaxed attitude didn t come too cheaply though; it had cost Ralph $9,812 for the privilege of trading his money with this company. A percentage fee of the profits gained , and a percentage of the total wire transfer due to sending to bank located out of the US. It worked out well, though, Ralph had made almost $65,000 USD in the week the money was held in EUROs, so he didn t mind so much about the fees.