You’re better off with the stock market than foreign exchange. Forex is a lot more risky, although the rewards can potentially be much, much larger, so can the losses. If you saw the Forex infomercial, I wouldn’t bother paying for that either.
With some basic knowledge, the stock market will make you 10-15% per year. Last year my rate of return was 16.05%, this year I’ve done very poorly and I’m down -1.45% overall so far. You have to look long-term.
It won’t take you a lot of time. You will want to spend several hours reading and learning about the stock market before you put any real money into it. I recommend the tutorials on www.investopedia.com. They also have a Stock Market Simulator which lets you set up a pretend investment account for free just to play around and see if you are ready to put real money into the stock market yet.
Once you get past the basic learning curve, it can take as little as minutes a day. You can just check your stocks each day, decide whether you want to hold or sell or buy more. If you are looking long-term you will be fine just checking your stocks once a week even. Or you can put in as much time as you want… watch the business reports on TV every night, read the business section of the newspaper every day, do hours of research into company’s financial statements, etc.
It sure beats leaving your money in the bank and losing value to inflation year-after-year, anyway.