9 ms·

Rich People Don't Talk to Robots

104 points by HR01 3y ago

lchengify 3y ago
For those who don't know, Josh Brown runs Ritholtz Wealth Management and hosts The Compound Podcast [1]. Probably one of the most insightful finance podcasts that covers a wide range of topics. Highly recommend subscribing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@TheCompoundNews https://www.youtube.com/@TheCompoundNews
Animats 3y ago
Patience. There was a time when executives didn't have screens and keyboards on their desks. That was for the little people. There are still some who still don't, but they are dying off.
- Mathnerd314 3y ago
  I think it is possible for AI to actually deliver a better experience than an expert. Like with the trip booking example, the expert still has to look up the flights and so on but an AI can process them instantly. And with language models it seems possible to be as flexible as a human. I think the biggest issue is trust - nobody trusts an AI right now (and rightly so), but an expert has a reputation and that is really what the rich people are paying for.
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    >the expert still has to look up the flights and so on but an AI can process them instantly. I get the idea though that the expensive experts actually have access to back channels that can allow them to skip right to the result. So unless the LLMs also are granted access to these sorts of exclusive channels, how can they compete? It's often who you know that will get you results. So who exactly do LLMs know? And will those people even interface with LLMs or provide a way for LLMs to interface with their exclusive resources?
- groby_b 3y ago
  There is an upside for not having to work through indirection. There's absolutely no upside to talking to a robot. Or a "hold" line. And it's worth keeping in mind that for services, the money flows in the opposite direction - work is buying your time on the keyboard/screen, but you are buying a non-robot experience. And rich people buying convenience won't ever die out.
- noduerme 3y ago
  That's because at a certain point those things became time-saving as opposed to picking up a phone and asking someone to do them for you. Things will change to the exact degree that the robots are able to provide more real time-saving value than humans, meaning a higher degree of accuracy and satisfaction. FTA: >> Rich people don’t attempt to save money by agreeing to sit on hold. This is the salient thing. If dealing with something for an hour saves you $1000, but you could have made $5000 doing something else for that hour, you won't deal with it (even if you don't, in fact, spend that hour doing something productive).
  - dkasper 3y ago
    It’s not even that, if I could save $1000 but I don’t care about $1000 I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t sit on hold for $10. A billionaire isn’t gonna sit on hold for $1000 unless they have an axe to grind.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      I'd quibble with that, depending on what you mean by "axe to grind". I'm not a billionaire, but I'm fairly well off. My billing rate is $300/hr. Still, I don't like to feel ripped off. Spending my time not being ripped off does add some ineffable value beyond the monetary. Maybe this puts me in an unusual category of people who love having axes to grind, but I feel like I didn't amass my savings by letting things slide. If it's $10, I might let it go. But I'm currently taking a company to small claims court over $800 for breach of contract. So I guess I'm contradicting myself... but there also is another element which is that you can't become wealthy if you make a habit of allowing people to chisel you. [edit] I don't think this contradicts the OP at all, because taking this company to court is the alternative to wasting my time talking to their robots.
      - mr_mitm 3y ago
        I know exactly what you mean. Recently I was on vacation in a country where a cab would take you through town for a price which would not be enough to get a taxi driver in my country to even start the engine. Of course some would charge you twice as much as others, which would still be very cheap compared to home, but that's not the comparison you make. You compare it to what the last taxi driver charged you and now you feel ripped off and disrespected by this particular taxi driver, even though now you are haggling about what is peanuts to me.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  > There are still some who still don't, but they are dying off. I'm not sure what's more profound with that: the hostility or stupidity. Patience isn't going to win the day here; there is a fundamental truth to what the article is saying. If there is such a thing in the future as a financial advising AI for individuals _and families_ of significant wealth, it won't be anything like what serves the "mass market". The complexity is incomparable, in addition to the expectations.
- rukuu001 3y ago
  Sure, but it’ll still probably be for the “I need two nights in Boca Raton midtown next week, make it happen, robo travel agent” type trip rather than “best of everything that suits my personal tastes” type trip.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    You hit on a really core thing... another way to say it is that a robot can only sell the experiences that exist in some packaged form, and that in itself is exactly what UHNWIs explicitly don't want.
- lchengify 3y ago
  FWIW, I don't think the author is talking about executives. I think he's talking about people on the level of ultra high-net-worth individual (UHNWI). People with roughly $30m or more in investable assets. People like that prefer to be focused on exactly whatever their building, and babysitting the money is rarely that thing. They often approach their private wealth manager with a broad plan on goals, and the PWM goes out and executes them with light direction. There are lawyers and accountants in the loop as well, all working on paper to manage the cash pile. It's a long term, multi-generational relationship that often involves multiple parties, one of which is often some or many governments. In addition, the PWM in this position prefers to get the client directly on the phone when possible. This is both to manage the relationship, and to sell novel finance products, often ones that aren't available on the open market. Until we get AGI, it's just not quite there to be outsourced to AI. People at that level really prefer having a person be responsible.
al_borland 3y ago
AI investing isn’t about selling to wealthy people, it’s to sell the middle class the idea they can invest like the rich at a fraction of the cost, and with a lower barrier to entry.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The robot I use just invests in each company proportional to it’s market cap.
  - HPMOR 3y ago
    The most efficient robot!!! Indexing FTW!
iwontberude 3y ago
I just want to say that I love Josh Brown -- thank you to him and Michael Batnick for holding it down over on The Compound. Have learned a lot!
4pkjai 3y ago
Didn’t like the tone of this post. Can’t wait for this person to be proven wrong.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  This is definitely an "old man yells at clouds" post. The author seems to believe that future AI-driven investment systems will work like ChatGPT and so will need to be "talked" to, which is bizarre. By 2040, human financial planners will have gone the way of the human computers of the 1940s.
- jruohonen 3y ago
  Me neither. Besides, there is this enduring confusion all over the place that "AI := LLM". I'd expect the radical AI (ML) innovations to be somewhere else in the long-run (like, say, in robotics, as hinted by the title but downplayed by the text).
iwontberude 3y ago
I think the bigger problem with broadly available AI advisors is that its too easy for institutions to know in advance how the retail market will react. It's not good to be part of a large, predictable retail class of investors.
yellow_lead 3y ago
> If we’re talking about the mass affluent - $100,000 to $1 million in investable assets This isn't really affluent on the level of being able to hire a personal assistant unless you're talking about the upper end.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I know plenty of people on that upper end and slightly above (as is common for upper middle class older people). None of them have 'personal assistants'.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  I think that is the author's point -- it's a very different set of needs and expectations.
- jameshart 3y ago
  You are in agreement with the author. His definition of 'rich people' is "the traditional bread-and-butter client for registered investment advisors of $1 million to $25 million in household wealth". The $100,000 - $1m asset class he refers to as the 'mass affluent' are who he concedes might be a market for 'roboadvisors'.
ranger207 3y ago
I'll go a step further and say that nobody _wants_ to talk to robots. Robots are simply too inflexible and cant respond or be reasoned with. AI for service jobs is going to go the same way as chatbots: companies saw people liked chatting rather than calling or emailing, so they automated that, but locked it down so much that the chatbots were basically a dumber version of the same menus already available. AI's going to be the same way: companies will see that people like talking to people, they'll use AI to try to automate customer support, they'll lock the AI down to a handful of possibilities and completely miss the point of why people preferred talking to people in the first place, some startup offering this service will be valued at $10 billion
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I disagree. I suspect with current technology even they will be able to provide the AI with backend functions it can call and then let it handle the support and calls to the functions.' It'll be a lot better than current 'select a few options' chatbot support than we have.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    There wasn’t really anything beyond lack of will that stopped companies from hooking up existing chatbots to backend functions so they could accomplish the most basic support tasks beyond searching a knowledgebase, so I’m not sure there’s a strong case that they will now, just because the language models are more powerful. If anything it’s a bigger risk to the company–an LLM with broad access to genuinely useful account management tools could easily be manipulated into doing things it shouldn’t, so it would have to be implemented very carefully.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Using LLMs for portfolio recommendations is overengineering imo. The typical person does not have such specific requirements that they need some huge model deciding on a custom portfolio for them.
throwaway13337 3y ago
Experts are overrated - especially at the top end. You end up with in-network people, which is different from having very good people. LLMs are useful because they're a diverse range of experts that are composable and immediate. We've never had something quite like it, and many people are still struggling to understand how to use it. Most of this talk sounds like the kind of denial that a lot of people on HN were doing when LLMs were first seen as a way to write code. Well, they do write code. They make us more effective, so maybe we need less of us in the future. Or maybe the pie grows because the kinds of things LLMs enable mean there are just more tasks developers can do, and so more developers are needed. Either could be true. The denial is built of fear. Also this guy's tone is pretty repugnant. Like, who thinks and talks like this? Seems comically retro. The only ones I know are those who derive their identity from money, whether they are rich or not. Mostly not. Ironically, a pretty poor existence. Edit: grammar checked with an LLM - not an expert.
juunpp 3y ago
> And the number one thing you do when you have lots of money is you pay people to deal with stuff. Deep wisdom here. Chatbots and LLMs are for peasants. You know you're going to have to deal with a Comcast LLM soon. It'll be more useless than the existing customer service.
skybrian 3y ago
I don't know if "millionaire next door" types count in this guy's definition of "rich," but I expect they're just going to use Vanguard anyway.
j7ake 3y ago
Everything about the author's description of the "dream vacation" sounded awful. A proper vacation is being able to spend 2-3 months abroad and taking it easy with no specific plans. The author describes a highly optimized itinerary where every meal and every day counts. Sounds like more stress than a vacation.
- 0wis 3y ago
  Sounds to you, and to me too. However there is as many different ways to do vacations as there are people. Some like to do nothing on a beach for days, others to live an adventure or meet people. I can totally understand why you want a totally optimized trip if you have money and little time. And I am sure part of the 25k€ package mentioned is spent on planning with enough time or options to avoid stress.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    I think that’s one big difference between American and European life. Americans have more money, but Europeans have more time and stability. In my opinion though, if you’re affluent enough to go on 25k vacations, why are they not affluent enough to take several months off at a time to actually enjoy a proper time off?
    - testHN1ac 3y ago
      May be they actually love what they do to stay away for months doing nothing on a 'vacation'.
- patchymcnoodles 3y ago
  Both is possible. I do sometimes make vacations unplanned with no return flight ticket and just enjoy the time there as long as I feel to. But then there are specialized holidays, where you need people to be with you. One example is my hobby being a diver. Going on a private diving safari needs planning and documents. Depending where you go are the documents, but you still need a boat, a crew and a dive guide and/or trainer. It's still very enjoyable for me, as I love diving, but it also needs planning.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
I think this person is probably right about AI, which I think may destroy society, and yet I still want him to be wrong, because it regularly revolts me that we have to care about the thinking strategies of high net worth individuals. Try to stop caring what rich people think for at least a day or two per week and focus on what poor people think, and maybe we won’t all end up shouting “Jo-na-than!”
rufus_foreman 3y ago
I prefer robots. I guess as I get richer I am supposed to be like Josh Brown wants me to be. His income maybe depends on that?
- testHN1ac 3y ago
  > I guess as I get richer I am supposed to be like Josh Brown wants me to be. Josh Brown doesn't know that you exist. He doesn't care if you ever become rich or not. > His income maybe depends on that? He is probably making better income than you by providing service to people a lot richer than you might ever be. You can keep using robots.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Normal people do. Servitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg Empathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE
sirspacey 3y ago
This is why I check new on HN Well written, insightful, contrarian, and real.
tomcam 3y ago
> There is a shortage of talent in the financial advisory space Isn’t it self-evident that in general if you are good at this you would not be selling your advice? By definition, if you are good, you can accept the risk and win. Why charge a couple percent in fees when you could invest the money yourself?
- technofiend 3y ago
  Because you can risk other people's money instead of your own while learning. If you're successful then great, you'll get a huge bonus. If you fail, you may get fired but still you didn't lose your own nest egg. And if you succeed consistently, it's enough to build a track record and leave to start your own fund.
- roenxi 3y ago
  The equilibrium position is you can invest your own money, then take money off others, invest that too and take a %. The danger zone is for small investors, where it doesn't make sense to advertise to them because the regulations are too demanding, margins too small and people tend to be flighty or need lots of hand-holding. That is basically why it there aren't "invest in stock!" signs on every ad stand. And good financial advice tends to be boring and doesn't change much. The same strategy tends to work in all weather - invest a little bit in everything, invest a bit more in things that do well and try not to take on unnecessary tax burdens.
- imachine1980_ 3y ago
  Even if you are great 2 millones fortune isn't happens over nigrh whit salary of 12k, being good financiar advisor means you give good financial analysis not that you, can afford the mortgage of house, because you get layoff for year, you or neer family don't get sick out of coverage, are alcoholic,why aren't already Rich too have already enough money so your own income isn't important in in your revenue at 45, you are bad financial advice if at 70 you can't afford retirement whiout having catastrophic circumstances
- testval123 3y ago
  Financial advisors generally charge a flat management fee (for example 1% of AUM). Hedge funds generally charge a management fee plus a performance fee. This is why hedge funds and other similar structures are much more lucrative and acquire more talent.

104 points by HR01 3y ago

For those who don't know, Josh Brown runs Ritholtz Wealth Management and hosts The Compound Podcast [1]. Probably one of the most insightful finance podcasts that covers a wide range of topics. Highly recommend subscribing. [1] https://www.youtube.com/@TheCompoundNews https://www.youtube.com/@TheCompoundNews

Animats 3y ago

Patience. There was a time when executives didn't have screens and keyboards on their desks. That was for the little people. There are still some who still don't, but they are dying off.

Mathnerd314 3y ago
I think it is possible for AI to actually deliver a better experience than an expert. Like with the trip booking example, the expert still has to look up the flights and so on but an AI can process them instantly. And with language models it seems possible to be as flexible as a human. I think the biggest issue is trust - nobody trusts an AI right now (and rightly so), but an expert has a reputation and that is really what the rich people are paying for.
- SirMaster 3y ago
  >the expert still has to look up the flights and so on but an AI can process them instantly. I get the idea though that the expensive experts actually have access to back channels that can allow them to skip right to the result. So unless the LLMs also are granted access to these sorts of exclusive channels, how can they compete? It's often who you know that will get you results. So who exactly do LLMs know? And will those people even interface with LLMs or provide a way for LLMs to interface with their exclusive resources?
groby_b 3y ago
There is an upside for not having to work through indirection. There's absolutely no upside to talking to a robot. Or a "hold" line. And it's worth keeping in mind that for services, the money flows in the opposite direction - work is buying your time on the keyboard/screen, but you are buying a non-robot experience. And rich people buying convenience won't ever die out.
noduerme 3y ago
That's because at a certain point those things became time-saving as opposed to picking up a phone and asking someone to do them for you. Things will change to the exact degree that the robots are able to provide more real time-saving value than humans, meaning a higher degree of accuracy and satisfaction. FTA: >> Rich people don’t attempt to save money by agreeing to sit on hold. This is the salient thing. If dealing with something for an hour saves you $1000, but you could have made $5000 doing something else for that hour, you won't deal with it (even if you don't, in fact, spend that hour doing something productive).
- dkasper 3y ago
  It’s not even that, if I could save $1000 but I don’t care about $1000 I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t sit on hold for $10. A billionaire isn’t gonna sit on hold for $1000 unless they have an axe to grind.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    I'd quibble with that, depending on what you mean by "axe to grind". I'm not a billionaire, but I'm fairly well off. My billing rate is $300/hr. Still, I don't like to feel ripped off. Spending my time not being ripped off does add some ineffable value beyond the monetary. Maybe this puts me in an unusual category of people who love having axes to grind, but I feel like I didn't amass my savings by letting things slide. If it's $10, I might let it go. But I'm currently taking a company to small claims court over $800 for breach of contract. So I guess I'm contradicting myself... but there also is another element which is that you can't become wealthy if you make a habit of allowing people to chisel you. [edit] I don't think this contradicts the OP at all, because taking this company to court is the alternative to wasting my time talking to their robots.
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      I know exactly what you mean. Recently I was on vacation in a country where a cab would take you through town for a price which would not be enough to get a taxi driver in my country to even start the engine. Of course some would charge you twice as much as others, which would still be very cheap compared to home, but that's not the comparison you make. You compare it to what the last taxi driver charged you and now you feel ripped off and disrespected by this particular taxi driver, even though now you are haggling about what is peanuts to me.
mlhpdx 3y ago
> There are still some who still don't, but they are dying off. I'm not sure what's more profound with that: the hostility or stupidity. Patience isn't going to win the day here; there is a fundamental truth to what the article is saying. If there is such a thing in the future as a financial advising AI for individuals _and families_ of significant wealth, it won't be anything like what serves the "mass market". The complexity is incomparable, in addition to the expectations.
rukuu001 3y ago
Sure, but it’ll still probably be for the “I need two nights in Boca Raton midtown next week, make it happen, robo travel agent” type trip rather than “best of everything that suits my personal tastes” type trip.
- noduerme 3y ago
  You hit on a really core thing... another way to say it is that a robot can only sell the experiences that exist in some packaged form, and that in itself is exactly what UHNWIs explicitly don't want.
lchengify 3y ago
FWIW, I don't think the author is talking about executives. I think he's talking about people on the level of ultra high-net-worth individual (UHNWI). People with roughly $30m or more in investable assets. People like that prefer to be focused on exactly whatever their building, and babysitting the money is rarely that thing. They often approach their private wealth manager with a broad plan on goals, and the PWM goes out and executes them with light direction. There are lawyers and accountants in the loop as well, all working on paper to manage the cash pile. It's a long term, multi-generational relationship that often involves multiple parties, one of which is often some or many governments. In addition, the PWM in this position prefers to get the client directly on the phone when possible. This is both to manage the relationship, and to sell novel finance products, often ones that aren't available on the open market. Until we get AGI, it's just not quite there to be outsourced to AI. People at that level really prefer having a person be responsible.

al_borland 3y ago

AI investing isn’t about selling to wealthy people, it’s to sell the middle class the idea they can invest like the rich at a fraction of the cost, and with a lower barrier to entry.

quickthrower2 3y ago
The robot I use just invests in each company proportional to it’s market cap.
- HPMOR 3y ago
  The most efficient robot!!! Indexing FTW!

iwontberude 3y ago

I just want to say that I love Josh Brown -- thank you to him and Michael Batnick for holding it down over on The Compound. Have learned a lot!

4pkjai 3y ago

Didn’t like the tone of this post. Can’t wait for this person to be proven wrong.

CharlesW 3y ago
This is definitely an "old man yells at clouds" post. The author seems to believe that future AI-driven investment systems will work like ChatGPT and so will need to be "talked" to, which is bizarre. By 2040, human financial planners will have gone the way of the human computers of the 1940s.
jruohonen 3y ago
Me neither. Besides, there is this enduring confusion all over the place that "AI := LLM". I'd expect the radical AI (ML) innovations to be somewhere else in the long-run (like, say, in robotics, as hinted by the title but downplayed by the text).

iwontberude 3y ago

I think the bigger problem with broadly available AI advisors is that its too easy for institutions to know in advance how the retail market will react. It's not good to be part of a large, predictable retail class of investors.

yellow_lead 3y ago

> If we’re talking about the mass affluent - $100,000 to $1 million in investable assets This isn't really affluent on the level of being able to hire a personal assistant unless you're talking about the upper end.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I know plenty of people on that upper end and slightly above (as is common for upper middle class older people). None of them have 'personal assistants'.
mlhpdx 3y ago
I think that is the author's point -- it's a very different set of needs and expectations.
jameshart 3y ago
You are in agreement with the author. His definition of 'rich people' is "the traditional bread-and-butter client for registered investment advisors of $1 million to $25 million in household wealth". The $100,000 - $1m asset class he refers to as the 'mass affluent' are who he concedes might be a market for 'roboadvisors'.

ranger207 3y ago

I'll go a step further and say that nobody _wants_ to talk to robots. Robots are simply too inflexible and cant respond or be reasoned with. AI for service jobs is going to go the same way as chatbots: companies saw people liked chatting rather than calling or emailing, so they automated that, but locked it down so much that the chatbots were basically a dumber version of the same menus already available. AI's going to be the same way: companies will see that people like talking to people, they'll use AI to try to automate customer support, they'll lock the AI down to a handful of possibilities and completely miss the point of why people preferred talking to people in the first place, some startup offering this service will be valued at $10 billion

whimsicalism 3y ago
I disagree. I suspect with current technology even they will be able to provide the AI with backend functions it can call and then let it handle the support and calls to the functions.' It'll be a lot better than current 'select a few options' chatbot support than we have.
- macNchz 3y ago
  There wasn’t really anything beyond lack of will that stopped companies from hooking up existing chatbots to backend functions so they could accomplish the most basic support tasks beyond searching a knowledgebase, so I’m not sure there’s a strong case that they will now, just because the language models are more powerful. If anything it’s a bigger risk to the company–an LLM with broad access to genuinely useful account management tools could easily be manipulated into doing things it shouldn’t, so it would have to be implemented very carefully.

whimsicalism 3y ago

Using LLMs for portfolio recommendations is overengineering imo. The typical person does not have such specific requirements that they need some huge model deciding on a custom portfolio for them.

throwaway13337 3y ago

Experts are overrated - especially at the top end. You end up with in-network people, which is different from having very good people. LLMs are useful because they're a diverse range of experts that are composable and immediate. We've never had something quite like it, and many people are still struggling to understand how to use it. Most of this talk sounds like the kind of denial that a lot of people on HN were doing when LLMs were first seen as a way to write code. Well, they do write code. They make us more effective, so maybe we need less of us in the future. Or maybe the pie grows because the kinds of things LLMs enable mean there are just more tasks developers can do, and so more developers are needed. Either could be true. The denial is built of fear. Also this guy's tone is pretty repugnant. Like, who thinks and talks like this? Seems comically retro. The only ones I know are those who derive their identity from money, whether they are rich or not. Mostly not. Ironically, a pretty poor existence. Edit: grammar checked with an LLM - not an expert.

juunpp 3y ago

> And the number one thing you do when you have lots of money is you pay people to deal with stuff. Deep wisdom here. Chatbots and LLMs are for peasants. You know you're going to have to deal with a Comcast LLM soon. It'll be more useless than the existing customer service.

skybrian 3y ago

I don't know if "millionaire next door" types count in this guy's definition of "rich," but I expect they're just going to use Vanguard anyway.

j7ake 3y ago

Everything about the author's description of the "dream vacation" sounded awful. A proper vacation is being able to spend 2-3 months abroad and taking it easy with no specific plans. The author describes a highly optimized itinerary where every meal and every day counts. Sounds like more stress than a vacation.

0wis 3y ago
Sounds to you, and to me too. However there is as many different ways to do vacations as there are people. Some like to do nothing on a beach for days, others to live an adventure or meet people. I can totally understand why you want a totally optimized trip if you have money and little time. And I am sure part of the 25k€ package mentioned is spent on planning with enough time or options to avoid stress.
- j7ake 3y ago
  I think that’s one big difference between American and European life. Americans have more money, but Europeans have more time and stability. In my opinion though, if you’re affluent enough to go on 25k vacations, why are they not affluent enough to take several months off at a time to actually enjoy a proper time off?
  - testHN1ac 3y ago
    May be they actually love what they do to stay away for months doing nothing on a 'vacation'.
patchymcnoodles 3y ago
Both is possible. I do sometimes make vacations unplanned with no return flight ticket and just enjoy the time there as long as I feel to. But then there are specialized holidays, where you need people to be with you. One example is my hobby being a diver. Going on a private diving safari needs planning and documents. Depending where you go are the documents, but you still need a boat, a crew and a dive guide and/or trainer. It's still very enjoyable for me, as I love diving, but it also needs planning.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

I think this person is probably right about AI, which I think may destroy society, and yet I still want him to be wrong, because it regularly revolts me that we have to care about the thinking strategies of high net worth individuals. Try to stop caring what rich people think for at least a day or two per week and focus on what poor people think, and maybe we won’t all end up shouting “Jo-na-than!”

rufus_foreman 3y ago

I prefer robots. I guess as I get richer I am supposed to be like Josh Brown wants me to be. His income maybe depends on that?

testHN1ac 3y ago
> I guess as I get richer I am supposed to be like Josh Brown wants me to be. Josh Brown doesn't know that you exist. He doesn't care if you ever become rich or not. > His income maybe depends on that? He is probably making better income than you by providing service to people a lot richer than you might ever be. You can keep using robots.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Normal people do. Servitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg Empathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE

sirspacey 3y ago

This is why I check new on HN Well written, insightful, contrarian, and real.

tomcam 3y ago

> There is a shortage of talent in the financial advisory space Isn’t it self-evident that in general if you are good at this you would not be selling your advice? By definition, if you are good, you can accept the risk and win. Why charge a couple percent in fees when you could invest the money yourself?

technofiend 3y ago
Because you can risk other people's money instead of your own while learning. If you're successful then great, you'll get a huge bonus. If you fail, you may get fired but still you didn't lose your own nest egg. And if you succeed consistently, it's enough to build a track record and leave to start your own fund.
roenxi 3y ago
The equilibrium position is you can invest your own money, then take money off others, invest that too and take a %. The danger zone is for small investors, where it doesn't make sense to advertise to them because the regulations are too demanding, margins too small and people tend to be flighty or need lots of hand-holding. That is basically why it there aren't "invest in stock!" signs on every ad stand. And good financial advice tends to be boring and doesn't change much. The same strategy tends to work in all weather - invest a little bit in everything, invest a bit more in things that do well and try not to take on unnecessary tax burdens.
imachine1980_ 3y ago
Even if you are great 2 millones fortune isn't happens over nigrh whit salary of 12k, being good financiar advisor means you give good financial analysis not that you, can afford the mortgage of house, because you get layoff for year, you or neer family don't get sick out of coverage, are alcoholic,why aren't already Rich too have already enough money so your own income isn't important in in your revenue at 45, you are bad financial advice if at 70 you can't afford retirement whiout having catastrophic circumstances
testval123 3y ago
Financial advisors generally charge a flat management fee (for example 1% of AUM). Hedge funds generally charge a management fee plus a performance fee. This is why hedge funds and other similar structures are much more lucrative and acquire more talent.