It's much, much easier for many people to make a living by promoting "educational" forex-related material than it is to make a living by trading forex themselves. One is right to be both very cautious and rather suspicious of "vendors", in general. There are no officially collated figures anywhere for the proportion of people who lose money, but from what I've seen of most widely available "forex education", I'd say the first of your two sentiments above has by far more truth to it.