Originally Posted by
Antipika
Also, buying stock is not as easy as pressing "buy" and hoping that the stock rise and sell when it's high. As a retail investor, you will probably invest in a very small amount of stocks (less than 1K). That mean that management fees, transaction processing fees, currency exchange fees, will eat up lot of your profit (if any) or make your losses bigger.
2nd thing, Forex. I suppose that you live in the USA and will be using USD to purchase stocks and or take your profits in. Forex is extremely complex, very hard to predict and will have a big influence on your profits/loss.
In 2007, USD/JPY was around 120. As of today, USD/JPY is below 80. That alone can make you lose everything and turn a nice 20% profit into a 20% loss.