Is the Forex for real?

I was introduced into the forex while sitting in one of my classses at Arizona State University. I had dabbled in the stock market over the years but had really never heard of the forex. I must say that I was very intrigued by the concept and the money that could be made. During one of our classes, we had a guest speaker come in to promote his forex platform and trading strategy. I waited up after class to talk with him to get a better idea of what the forex was all about. I went home that night and did a Google search and found a ton of people trying to sell me their fool proof system that was guaranteed to make me the big bucks. Being a college student, I didn't have a lot of extra cash a spent a little time browsing through everything and then put my forex investing on the back burning.
Well, several years had past since graduation and a co worker of mine and I got into a pretty in depth conversation about the possibility of placing some funds with a forex broker. We talked a lot about those crazy high returns that all of the forex marketers talk about and we wanted to test it out to see if if was for really. This is initially were my adventure in the forex begins. My ultimate was goal was to find out if it was really possible to make the types of returns that these marketers were talking about.