Investing is always a challenging proposition. With a lot of investing opportunities around, it may be quite hard to choose which one will be the best choice in putting your hard earned money into. Aside from knowing what are the good investment opportunities around, you must also try to be aware of what are those so-called investment opportunities out there that only aim to fool you.

With many so-called hot investment opportunities out there, there are also some that just seem too good to be true. They may only be investment scams that have quite savvy and convincing salesmen duping people out of there. Although they can be legitimate investment opportunities, you should try to think things over before you get lured into all the sales talk. Here are some so-called investment opportunities to watch out for.

Gold Buying

You may have heard of news lately that gold has recently reached all-time highs in terms of value. Many brokers would now be out there trying to get more people to invest more in gold, convincing them that it would be quite a lucrative one. Although it might sound true and a legitimate investment, buying gold may not be as lucrative as you might think.

Gold buying would have proven to be a profitable investment in you started investing on them 5 or 6 years ago. It was then that gold was still at its old US$271 per ounce price. Since then gold has climbed up in value at a staggering rate that has recently reached above US$900. But investing in gold now will mean that you will be buying them at its current high price. There is no indication so sure that it will be continuing on its upward climb in the next several years. Investing in them today may not be as "hot" as some salesmen may be telling you.

Equity-Indexed Annuities

It may sound like a good investment to put money into, but equity indexed annuities can become too complex to actually understand. What those who try to convince investors focus into is by saying that this investment will allow you to earn stock market profits without worrying about losses. You earn profits when the stock market is up. You don’t lose if it goes down. By this explanation, it could easily sound quite convincing enough to put money into.

The problem with equity-indexed annuities is that those returns may actually be smaller than any other investment opportunities. Although the worst you can do is to not get any returns if the stock market crashes, the most you would probably get is around an average of two percent return in a stock market that normally averages around 10 percent. The reason is that such investments have set limits for caps and spreads that will be credited and deducted into your account, respectively. That is the price for ensuring that you still get your starting investment back even if the stock market crashes.