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No. If anything, they are going to be more irrational. The incentives for most advisers are horrible. Ymmv, if you have a good adviser then great. But I used t
by hogFeast 5y ago
No. If anything, they are going to be more irrational. The incentives for most advisers are horrible.
Ymmv, if you have a good adviser then great. But I used to work in this area, and even in my first real job (not my first job in the industry though) the level of ignorance was brutally obvious.
For example, my first employer was a single adviser firm that just got acquired for $5m...this guy didn't know how to use Excel, he didn't know how to build a financial forecast, he didn't understand that life expectancy at birth was different to expectancy at retirement, he didn't understand basic elements of finance (for example, why you can't make money buying a stock and selling after they pay a dividend), he didn't understand how to compute returns, and falsified those numbers in marketing when they showed bad performance...and this is a guy who has hundreds of clients, and $100m+ in assets. However bad you think it is, it is much much worse.
Most of the people on here will do better if they apply a little time, and understand that human reasoning is flawed (i.e. don't get swept in the hot new thing). That is all that is required.
- zwieback 5y agoScary! I'm still 8-10 yrs from retirement but most of my funds are in target-retirement-date type funds with lower risk. This latest round of news stories and conversations like this motivate me to look at what actual stocks I own. I can totally relate to the irrational exuberance - I look at how well my investments have done through the pandemic and expect things to get "even better when the economy wakes up again" but that could be totally wrong.
- hogFeast 5y agoTarget date funds are least bad...if they are composed of ETFs. It isn't worth looking at individual stocks. If you want another layer of diversification: add a different asset class (for example, more bonds), or add more geographical exposure. This isn't advice of course, so be careful to understand how any change has impacted performance in the past (it isn't always a good guide but it is better than nothing).
- scsilver 5y agoDid you report them to finra?
- hogFeast 5y agoNot in the US. Unbelievably, there aren't specific rules against falsifying returns if you are careful with how you present them (for example, the CFA, the main accreditation for fund managers, just has a "code of conduct"...ironically, the guy who is the director of conduct on the CFA board in my country used to steal from employees). This guy didn't actually know this, he just didn't understand how to construct returns, and made "adjustments" until the number was right. His only real area of knowledge was complex, high-fee insurance products, he knew nothing about actual investing (he used to work as a captive salesman at an insurance company).
- nerdponx 5y agoI think they were more asking about target date funds at major institutions like T Rowe Price, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. But that's a hell of a story.