Through my experience as a Certified Financial Planner(r) in counseling clients and in staying abreast of changes of the financial product companies, it has become quite evident time and again that it is a lot easier to sell consumers what they think they want rather than to educate them on what they need. From insurance carriers and financial sales people selling 'guaranteed products' at exorbitant costs to mutual fund companies seeding multiple new funds and then promoting the ones that do well while silently closing the unsuccessful funds before they receive their Morningstar ratings, consumers are preyed upon and have to side step a mine field of damaging advice and products if they're to be successful and reach their life's goals.
The Wall Street machine certainly isn't slowing down. Rather than educating consumers on market history, so they can learn why the negative returns from The Great Recession--while not pleasant nor frequent--are in fact a part of investing, Wall Street is instead now more actively pushing products that prey upon consumers' recent and deep fears. Mutual funds that are aggressively trying to get in and out of the market, called market timing, are the new fad. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal, entitled More Mutual Funds 'Time' Market, describes why this is such a risky strategy.
Here's a prediction: looking back five years from today, a majority of the market-timing funds in existence today will underperform their benchmark--much more so than what one would expect from blind, random luck. A small minority of the funds will outperform their benchmark--much less than what one would expect from blind, random luck. Yet these darlings will be touted in the financial media and will receive large inflows from investors chasing returns.
Then over the subsequent five year period, these investors will be disappointed as their chosen guru no long has the 'gu' or the 'ru' (aka 'luck') that enabled them previously outperform. This is the continual dance that Wall Street does with consumers and the consumers are consistently dazzled by Wall Street darlings only later to find the emperor has no clothes.
If investors truly realized there were no silver bullet and took the harder road of educating themselves or working with a financial planner that can guide them, I have no doubt they would be in better financial shape and have much greater peace of mind.
Click here to read the full Wall Street Journal article.
The Wall Street machine certainly isn't slowing down. Rather than educating consumers on market history, so they can learn why the negative returns from The Great Recession--while not pleasant nor frequent--are in fact a part of investing, Wall Street is instead now more actively pushing products that prey upon consumers' recent and deep fears. Mutual funds that are aggressively trying to get in and out of the market, called market timing, are the new fad. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal, entitled More Mutual Funds 'Time' Market, describes why this is such a risky strategy.
"But academic research raises doubts that the typical fund manager can successfully time the market over the long haul. Anders Ekholm, adjunct professor at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, recently analyzed more than 4,000 U.S. stock funds' returns between 2000 and 2007. Managers helped their performance through stock-picking, he found, but hurt their returns by market-timing.In my opinion the article is somewhat more favorable to market timing and stock picking than it should be, given the overwhelming academic evidence against them. There will always be money managers that get lucky and outperform, especially in the short run. However, to consistently guess right on both the prediction made and the timing involved in executing the investment strategy is virtually impossible to do.
There are a couple of reasons why the deck is stacked against market-timers, Mr. Ekholm says. Market-timing requires more trading, and transaction costs hurt performance. What's more, while a manager may relatively easily dig up some unique information that gives him an edge in selecting an individual stock, it's difficult to get such superior information about the overall market."
Here's a prediction: looking back five years from today, a majority of the market-timing funds in existence today will underperform their benchmark--much more so than what one would expect from blind, random luck. A small minority of the funds will outperform their benchmark--much less than what one would expect from blind, random luck. Yet these darlings will be touted in the financial media and will receive large inflows from investors chasing returns.
Then over the subsequent five year period, these investors will be disappointed as their chosen guru no long has the 'gu' or the 'ru' (aka 'luck') that enabled them previously outperform. This is the continual dance that Wall Street does with consumers and the consumers are consistently dazzled by Wall Street darlings only later to find the emperor has no clothes.
If investors truly realized there were no silver bullet and took the harder road of educating themselves or working with a financial planner that can guide them, I have no doubt they would be in better financial shape and have much greater peace of mind.
Click here to read the full Wall Street Journal article.