Should you invest in forex? Read the risks first

No, if you would be using borrowed money or money you need within 12 months, if you are looking for income to replace a salary, or if you could not stomach losing 30% of your capital.

Outside those three groups, the answer comes down to two things only you know: how much you are prepared to lose, and whether you understand the risk you are taking on.

One thing up front, so you do not waste your time: if what you really want to know is “can you make money from forex”, the honest answer will not be a comfortable one.

Vietnam’s legal framework, stated precisely

This is where people get it wrong most often, in both directions. Three things need to be kept apart:

• No forex broker is licensed in Vietnam. The State Bank of Vietnam has said so explicitly (VnExpress, 07/05/2025). Under the foreign exchange management rules, only banks, non-bank credit institutions and branches of foreign banks may trade in and provide foreign exchange services.
• Unlicensed foreign exchange business carries penalties. The penalty framework sits in Decree 88/2019/ND-CP on administrative penalties in the monetary and banking sector.
• But those penalties target business and brokerage activity, not individuals trading for themselves. No provision yet names the case of an individual opening their own account with an international broker.

What is certain, and affects you directly: because the broker sits outside Vietnam, Vietnamese authorities have no power to act on your behalf in a dispute. Details: does a Tier-1 licence protect Vietnamese clients.

Loss figures published by the regulator itself

The figure below is rarely mentioned in Vietnamese articles on the same topic.

In 2021, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) capped leverage for retail clients (leverage lets you control a larger sum than your real capital). It published the results for the first six months after the cap took effect:

Read this figure correctly: it does not say the leverage cap made people trade better. It says that in a developed, tightly supervised market, retail clients were losing a net 372 million dollars a quarter.

Most of that loss came from positions too large for the account, which is exactly what a mechanical cap can block.

Two major regulators (ASIC and ESMA) looked at real loss data and decided not to allow this product to be sold at high leverage to people like you.

The leverage you are being offered in Vietnam is the very level they banned. The full mechanism: why brokers offer you high leverage.

Three groups who should not take part

More specific than the familiar advice to “only use spare money”, here are the three groups:

1. People using borrowed money, shared money, or money they plan to use in the next 12 months. The reason is deadline pressure: it forces you to win within a set time frame, and that is the fastest route to oversized positions.
2. People looking for income to replace a salary. Needing to withdraw a regular amount every month runs directly against market volatility. If you still have to withdraw in a losing month, the account shrinks and cannot recover.
3. People who could not bear to lose 30% of the account in a single week. If that figure would keep you up at night, this product is not for you. And that is a perfectly reasonable answer.

If you still want to look into it, the right order

Start with the order of learning; there is no need to think about “how much to deposit” yet. The first three steps are free and need no deposit at all:

1. Understand what you are trading. Forex is the market in exchange rates, and you own no asset; profit and loss come from price differences and are amplified by leverage. Start with what forex is.
2. Understand the costs and how money is deducted. Spread, commission and swap come out of your account on every trade, win or lose. See what the spread is.
3. Understand risk before looking for opportunity. Money management decides whether you still have an account to trade with, and it is a skill you can learn, unlike “predicting correctly”, which nobody can guarantee.
4. Use a demo account for long enough. The point is to see how you react to a run of losing trades: how long to trade on demo.

The full path, in order: learning forex for beginners.

Conclusion: change the question

The question “should you invest in forex” has no general answer, because it bundles two very different questions into one. Split apart, each can be answered:

• “Can I accept the risk of losing most of this capital?” Only you can answer that, and answering it honestly before you deposit costs far less than answering it afterwards.
• “Do I understand enough to know what risk I am taking on?” This one can be learned, for free, and should be settled before you deposit any money.

If the second question is not settled yet, it is not yet time to answer the original one.

We deliberately give no profit figures or win rates for anyone. Wherever you think a claim lacks support, tell us.

Spotted something inaccurate? Tell us and we will check it and publish a correction.