Financial Planners

“Everyone is a predator of the investor” Stephen Jarislowsky, Feb 11 2010 Globe Investor

• “Mutual fund salespeople are often stock brokers who turned to selling mutual funds because their competitively low commissions didn't allow them to make a living selling just stocks. And financial advisors are only too often just mutual fund and insurance salespeople in disguise.” Stephen Jarislowsky, The Investment Zoo, page 80

There is broad scale expropriation of other people's money in the financial industry. Beware! Sometimes, some of them, just flog and forget.

• Perhaps it is unfair to put it this way, but the practice of a financial planner entails gradually transferring the assets of their clients to their own pockets. The transfer rate is 2% to 3% a year. In about 20 years, the financial planner will have more than the client, in thirty years or so, twice as much. That's why they want you to buy and hold and why they have penalties for withdrawing your own money from their coffers. Dividend investors buy and hold too, but for an entirely different reason: we hold for the growing income.