Professional Finance people no better than amateurs

2010

Meeper wrote: »

This thread and those like it should be locked and deleted.

This is a site to help people. Denegrating the IFA profession, which is the sad hobby of some here, is not helpful and may in fact lead a number of people to avoid the IFA community to their great detriment.

I beseech the moderation staff to remove this thread and all threads like it, for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with helping people, it is simply designed to bash IFA's which is patently unhelpful.

Glad to see you support free speech. :rotfl:

darkpool

Meeper wrote: »

This thread and those like it should be locked and deleted.

This is a site to help people. Denegrating the IFA profession, which is the sad hobby of some here, is not helpful and may in fact lead a number of people to avoid the IFA community to their great detriment.

I beseech the moderation staff to remove this thread and all threads like it, for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with helping people, it is simply designed to bash IFA's which is patently unhelpful.

so let's get this right, you want all the anti IFA threads removed? i presume that's so the IFAs here can continue their "IFAs are good guys" propaganda?

BobQ

Meeper wrote: »

This thread and those like it should be locked and deleted.

This is a site to help people. Denegrating the IFA profession, which is the sad hobby of some here, is not helpful and may in fact lead a number of people to avoid the IFA community to their great detriment.

I beseech the moderation staff to remove this thread and all threads like it, for the simple reason that it has nothing to do with helping people, it is simply designed to bash IFA's which is patently unhelpful.

Were this a thread posted by someone who was asking for help I would agree that its unfair to hijack it to debate the merits of the IFA profession. However the forum is here to discuss consumer issues (not just to help people directly) and whether IFAs give good advice or are value for money is a legitimate issue to discuss.

I doubt that anyone will be detered from using an IFA by the comments on this forum, they are more likely to be deterred by the poor performance of the products IFAs recommend (which is not to say the IFA was not giving reasonable advice).

Your approach seems to be that any comment critical of your profession should be suppressed, I think you are entitled to your opinion but I think your reaction is indicative of paranoia! All professions ought to be able to take criticism and are entitled to defend themselves.

Personally I try not to denigrate IFAs or other professions and find the advice and opinions useful and/or interesting. But this does not mean that all IFAs are above criticism.:)

brasso

The trouble with this sort of discussion is that it's always more likely to attract those who feel disappointed by advice they've been given by IFAs, rather than those who have prospered after seeing an IFA. Human nature, I guess, but it does distort the picture.

Gold price trends have created fertile ground for a whole new generation of amateur experts who can say they sensibly avoided those beastly rip-off IFAs, and instead sensibly followed their gut instinct. Anyone who bought in at the bottom and sold at the top, got lucky. Good for you. And even after the inevitable run of failing investments to come, they will still believe themselves to be astute investors, based on the previous triumph.

It's how gamblers behave. I know because I've been through that myself, with oil prices. After my great success, it took me a few years, and a few failures, to accept that one-off instinctive punts do not make a sound investment strategy. I've come back round to adopting a longer term softly-softly approach which is more like the IFA mindset. I still think of myself as having a higher risk appetite but at least I spread the investments around across sectors and asset classes, and have some sort of rationale for it. So far, so good.

I come back to the unrealistic expectations point about IFAs. From reading this discussion, I get the impression that people think IFAs pretend to be share tipsters with privileged information. This is not my experience at all. Perhaps there are rogue IFAs out there but it is simply not in their own interest, never mind their clients, to push people into reckless investments. To protect their reputation, they have to be pretty cautious it seems to me -- and perhaps this is what some don't like. With the benefit of hindsight, they look at their investments which made a measly 10% over the year, while the bloke in the pub is crowing about raking in 50% from gold, and blame the IFA for giving 'bad advice'. It's understandable but desperately, desperately naive and short-sighted.

Tell you what, let's all agree to meet back here in 10 years time and compare current IFA recommendations with the decade of gut instinct punts we made instead?

opinions4u

Tell you what, let's all agree to meet back here in 10 years time and compare
current IFA recommendations with the decade of gut instinct punts we made
instead?

If I don't sort out my internet addiciton I'll have been sat here for all of that decade!

dunstonh

Gold price trends have created fertile ground for a whole new generation of amateur experts who can say they sensibly avoided those beastly rip-off IFAs, and instead sensibly followed their gut instinct. Anyone who bought in at the bottom and sold at the top, got lucky. Good for you. And even after the inevitable run of failing investments to come, they will still believe themselves to be astute investors, based on the previous triumph.

Its been that way for years. The internet just gives them a voice. I have heard people say so many times that one investment they have now is better than the one they had before. Yet when you find out what they had then and what now, you often see that the old one was "better" or even no real difference, The main difference was timing. One saw a stockmarket crash in there and the other saw the recovery that followed. I have seen the same applied to tax wrappers. e.g. My ISA has done so much better than my pension so i dont pay into the pension any more. Clearly showing that they dont understand that pensions and ISAs can have the same investments and if you put the same in both you would get the same rate of return. Yet they slag off the one they perceive as bad and if an adviser was involved, then they get it as well. In some cases, you see people comparing the "poor" performance of a cautious investment against their "better" investment which is much higher risk but covered a growth period. You rarely hear from them again when a loss period occurs.

Credit-Crunched

2010 wrote: »

Firstly O4U

This has been twisted by the usual biased IFA`s who seem to spend more time on here than they do selling their wares.
(so maybe there is something in it about the well paid deserting them in droves because of their high charges)

Have you ever been on the comps/benefits boards, lordy if those people spent as much time looking for work as they did comping and finding out how many handouts they can get they would be millionaires!!

:rotfl:

Spiggle

Hello,

Having read this thread I couldn't decide whether to write this or not. Please don't castigate me, I'm not an IFA and currently not a big time investor but have used the services of an IFA in the past. This was some years ago by the way. I decided it was worth putting my experience forward from a neutral perspective.

When we needed advice and the wide scope an IFA could offer we went to a local IFA who was recommended to us. We had a number of meetings with him, he got us very good products for what we wanted with no difficulties at all. He dealt with everything for us in a helpful, professional, efficient and courteous manner.

Since then I have learnt a lot more and as the years have passed have moved to different products for which I didn't need the IFA's service. Nevertheless, every year he will write me a letter offering me a review, with no sales pitches in I should add. For the past few years I just give him a call when the letter arrives and let him know we're ok for the moment. This is recieved in the same polite and courteous manner as I have come to expect based on experience.

If my circumstances changed dramatically (unlikely as I don't do the lottery!) or in time when I retire, I will have no hesitation in consulting him as whilst I can DIY at the levels I currently have, I would want his experience and knowledge to help guide my decisions. But whichever way I decided to go, based upon his advice or not, I would always know that I had taken the decision and the IFA had provided me the widest of options some of which I may not be able to access independently.

I don't get all the historical arguments on here about who recommends what with gold or whatever and I'm certainly not going to waste my valuable time looking it all up. I just think that it's a bad place to be when every IFA is accused of being useless. That's not my experience, sorry.

Right I'll go back to my own little world of DIY ISAs, best bank accounts and the like now. Hope I won't regret sticking my head above this particular parapet!

All the best,
Spigs

HelpWhereIcan

OK. I am intrigued. Maybe I should even start a new thread.

There are many very competent amateur investors here(and in the world in general) and more incompetent and/or dishonest advisers than there ever should be (one is too many). I have no doubts as to the competence of the IFAs who post here so I amnot really directing my experiment at them – although they are more thanwelcome to take part.

I propose to give a general outline of a case I am looking at – no names, some details changed to protect those involved frombeing identified and me falling foul of DPA etc.

I will answer with whatever information you ask of me (where reasonable and possible) to help you devise your solution for theclient.

I would like to see what an ‘amateur’ would suggest if they were asked by the same client for advice.

Members from both sides of the fence can then express an opinion of the advice offered to include effectiveness against the stated objective, cost, risk etc etc. IFAs and some others would be able to say how the FSA, their Network etc would see the advice from a compliance point of view.

I would suggest that anyone who posts an answer accepts the following stipulations:

1. You must be willing to provide the same sort of indemnified advice an IFA would i.e. an indefinite right for the recipient of the advice to complain and claimredress in the future.

2. You must outline immediately any caveats you would apply to the advice

3. Your solution must include investment vehicle/wrapper, funds, trusts used and methodof administration

4. You must mention any areas of advice outside of financial – legal etc – you would recommend the client take in conjunction with or shortly after your advice

5. You must set out how often and how (if at all) the advice should be reviewed

6. You must set out how the performance of your solution will be measured i.e. against which benchmark; are there any other factors such as taxation, legal or personal issues which the advice should be measured against and over what period of time

7. You must set out what you think to be a fair charge for the work you have done and the responsibility you will be taking for it

Not doing this to be confrontational, just interested in seeing whether there is a disconnect between what both sides of the fence see as what falls within the scope of an IFA.

Could be an interesting little exercise. Thoughts?

Reactor_2

In response to the title of this thread, I agree. All the information you need can be found on the internet to build your investment portfolio.

I think the best way to view this is that the difference between a professional and the amateur is that professional has the qualifications and the amateur doesn't, which means the professional is subject to redress should they fall short of standards.

In terms of performance an amateur can perform better than a professional, but I wouldn't bet on it. People have to accept that investing is risky and the markets are a zero-sum game. The only part you can control is how much you are willing to lose.