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Thursday, June 3, 2010

Essential Info For Every Investor

This is a must read for every investor on the fiduciary standard, written by Stephen Young, CFP. He suggests asking, "Do you have a legal obligation to act in my best interests?"

5 comments:

  1. I've always lived under the principle that no one is as interested in my financial well-being as me, and that the responsibility was on my shoulders to educate myself about investing and portfolio construction, and to not blindly follow anyone's advice. If I don't fully understand what someone is to sell or don't think the product is right for me, I don't buy it. If I don't understand the compensation structure and expenses of the product, I don't buy it. Keeping expenses down is a primary goal of mine, and most products sold by non-fiduciaries don't meet that criteria.

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  2. Do we need the government to put a warning label on the advertising materials for brokers to say, "The recomendations made by this advisor may be hazardous to your wealth!"? Unfortunately many people out there won't take responsibility for their own actions and this in essence puts a wounded hyena in front of a pride (?) of lions!

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  3. And we know what will happen to a wounded hyena every time.... it has always puzzled me why people treat their investments as if they going to Vegas, and then get indignant at the results and blame everyone but themselves. It also struck me as odd that in this whole debate over Goldman Sacks the so called "smart" institutional investors were portrayed as GS's hyenas.

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  4. @Biz of Life

    I agree. The sophisticated investors should have been able to read and understand the financial statement of the companies that were a part of Abacus and then appropriately assess the risk-reward ratio. Instead, they made a bet and loss badly. It was just like Vegas.

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  5. To me it's like the cookie jar's on the floor in a million pieces with cookies spread all over the place and none of the kids have a clue of how it happened. The sophisticated investors knew what they had invested in. They know how to analyze these issues and they received an exceptionally high yield on the ones that worked. It is just sad that because of the perverse incentives of our political system that politicians seek scapegoats in situations like this so they can pontificate on national television, garner soundbites, and yes, unfortunately, feed into the prejudices of the American public. The American public has always had an uneasy relationship with investment banking.

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