Secured Bonds 9%pa
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What this forum needs is a sub-board under Savings & Investments called:
Extremely Risky Investments Promoted by Newbies
so a board guide could move these posts off the main board.
It would immediately be renamed to [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] Investments [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] by [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] and the board guide would be permanently PPRed.0 -
Malthusian wrote: »It would immediately be renamed to [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] Investments [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] by [text deleted by MSE Forum Team] and the board guide would be permanently PPRed.
Let's try a different approach then:
Please go ahead and invest in these 'bonds' and let us know how you get on.0 -
We could do with a sticky about these unregulated investments. It would cover the usual suspects (bonds, car parks, hotel rooms, vineyards, etc) and would provide a way to warn people in general terms without as much risk of mod intervention: someone posts about a scheme, and they get linked to a thread that highlights the risks, explains the lack of oversight, details past scams and explains how to check up on the company, all without having to say "this specific company looks like a bunch of crooks".
Any volunteers?0 -
Can bowlhead's reply be plaved as a sticky ?
I feel that responses on the lines of "it is very risky because ftse returns about 4% and cash returns 1% so what do you think 9%'s return risk would be" are counterproductive as they kind of legitimise those 9% options because people quite reasonably would conclude that 1% is losing money to inflatuon and ftse wlwith its 4% is risky anyway so they may as well to go for the 9% option imagining themselves to be daring and brave. Then representative of those bonds start responding on the lines of " he who never tries never gets anywhere" and so on.
As I see it the issue is not so much risk but
a) inability of a punter to assess that risk - as anothr poster very aptly said - what would one think if a random person on th street asked them for some money-( btw can that response to be made into sticky as well please? ).
b)the companies showing themselves being unethical from get go by misleading advertisement using the words "government" and " guarantee"
c) other far more suitable investment opportunities existing if one wanted to partake in lending to companies/ buying bonds
As we get the same questions here every week for years can we have a sticky please , would be a shame if an excellent bowlheads post gets lost.The word "dilemma" comes from Greek where "di" means two and "lemma" means premise. Refers usually to difficult choice between two undesirable options.
Often people seem to use this word mistakenly where "quandary" would fit better.0 -
IMHO there are probably at least another 500 good posts I've made which could be made sticky too, then you would have a lot of stuck threads on the first 12 pages with no new content until after that... but at least many of the issues that come up from time to time would easily be covered...As we get the same questions here every week for years can we have a sticky please , would be a shame if an excellent bowlheads post gets lost.
In seriousness there are a lot of good comments made by a lot of posters from time to time which are decent ways of explaining issues which will come up again and again. It's inevitable that a lot of content just drops away and becomes difficult to locate through the search function if you don't know exactly the optimum keywords to use and which username had previously said it.
IMHO it's not necessarily that entire threads should be 'stuck' up there at the top of the front page, because you could literally fill a whole front page with the different subject areas. Just perhaps that links to common and recyclable answers (individual posts) could be put into an index page of links a bit like Crabman has done with the other sticky which has shortcut links to popular threads.
Obviously linking a post rather than a whole thread as a sticky loses context and you might want multiple posts for some areas (e.g. if you liked what I said and what jimjames said and what dunstonh said and what someone said on the exact same topic last week in a different thread, then that's a lot of individual posts to link to).
However, making an entire thread 'sticky' can sometimes be hard to see the wood for the trees. For example I wrote some sensible things on a whole range of issues over the course of a year or so which got lost in the Vanguard Lifestrategy poll thread, but there's no point stickying a thousand-post thread just because it has some useful posts embedded in it.
And for example at the moment the other sticky is due to one long post I made in the 'debt bubble' thread which followed on from a then-current discussion elsewhere about the wiseness or otherwise of investing in bonds or the interplay of debt vs equity. But seeing the whole thread 'stickied' is unnecessary; as the rest of it descends into some rants about other stuff (as many threads do) so new users would be thinking "what's so special about this thread that it needs to be preserved for all time".
Really what this place could do with is some sort of wiki which allows content to be contributed by many people and organised and self-moderated so it becomes an encyclopedia of collective thoughts on savings and investing. However, organised content does exist elsewhere around the internet (investopedia's dictionary and university sections, monevator and various other blogs). The beauty of a forum is the freefrorm unstructured debates and arguments and threads with ten different people clambering over each other to make the same point in their own words. A blessing in terms of content generation but a curse in terms of ever being able to find stuff again.
For MSE monetising the site, clearly huge volumes of content being generated, lost and later recycled is the sort of thing that makes for the appearance of a busy thriving web presence, even if it were much smarter to just have a huge FAQ using regurgitated comments from prolific users
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I reported it as spam!bostonerimus wrote: »Are these high return bond posts real questions or just surrogates for these [strike]scams[/strike] schemes. I get suspicious when the authors have just one or two posts.
Of course the answer is always the same..... today you'll only get high return with high risk. Sometimes that's legitimate as it's in regulated funds, stocks, bonds etc that you can buy and sell on major markets. These unregulated high return bond schemes obviously don't fall into that category and should be avoided.0 -
capital0ne wrote: »I reported it as spam!
The only problem with that, is that when enough people click on it to say they suspect it to be spam, it gets removed - which in one sense is ok...
... but in another sense having the OP removed means that the thread dies along with all the responses and commentary warning people that things of this nature are high risk.
Then because there are no posts about it it won't appear in searches and someone else will come along and ask about it next week and they can't just be referred to the last thread we already had on the topic, we have to tell the story all over again about why you might like to avoid making loans to private businesses that you haven't previously had any dealings with.0 -
capital0ne wrote: »What is a secure investment?
NS&I or a cash deposit protected by the FSCS.
Not an investment that has something like "secured bond with a First Charge on *wavy hands* backed by Galapagos Insurance LLC, one of St Kitts and Nevis' leading insurance brokers" in its spiel.0 -
To be fair, asking the question on here would be a pretty poor way of promoting the, ahem, investment, given that these threads always attract so many well-informed and uniformly negative responses, and tend to get fairly high Google rankings.bostonerimus wrote: »Are these high return bond posts real questions or just surrogates for these [strike]scams[/strike] schemes. I get suspicious when the authors have just one or two posts.
Unless you take the view that there is no such thing as bad publicity, of course...0
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