Q: A question for debate:
We all seem to get mad that the financial-industrial complex is repeatedly rigged for the Big Boys. I’d suggest to you that the public should just give up on the wall street-banker/big bank/mutual fund industry as having any possibility of being fair to you or me. Thus, it makes no sense to be mad at it. Instead, people should invest the way their grandparents did: bonds, cash savings in a local bank or a hole in your backyard, real property, and (if they’re savvy enough) businesses or stocks that they understand. –Michael G., San Antonio, TX
This is a really good question for debate, Michael, and I agree with some of the spirit of it. I suspect millions of people have had a version of this thought, wondering if they’re the suckers at a rigged game and whether it’s time to take their marbles and go home – to bury their savings in the back yard or the local bank. But while I’m sympathetic with the question, I disagree on the actionable consequences of your view.
I particularly like your suggestion, paralleling Michael Pollan’s food movement of the last few years,[1] to do only what your grandparents would recognize as investing. There’s virtue in simplicity, and you could not go too far wrong that way. Many of us have an imaginary Amish pastoral scene in mind as a balm on a particularly confusing day. The horse-drawn buggy approach to financial life could be a good financial life.
I’m not willing to actually go along with the Amish pastoral investing life, however, either in my own life or for people who ask me my opinion on what they should do.
Mutual funds, to pick the most beautiful of the babies you’ve tossed out with the bathwater, are just like some of the other totally awesome things we love to complain about. If you’ve got money to invest, with a few clicks or a simple phone call, you can own a piece of a wide swath of the world’s most successful companies. At any point in your lifetime, should you choose, you can get your investment back with a similar amount of effort, with a day’s notice. Real property investing doesn’t work that way. CDs don’t work that way. Private business investing doesn’t work that way. Our grandparents had to wait for the end of their 6 months (or whatever time) period to get their cash out of CDs, or possibly years to liquidate their real estate or private businesses.
ETFs, the ADHD sufferer’s version of mutual funds, are similarly awesome, if used correctly. You can even invest in a wider variety of instruments than mutual funds, including currencies, commodities, real estate, in addition to the opportunity to short markets and take on leverage.
As a recovering hedge fund manager, I also obviously maintain a soft spot in my heart for hedge funds as a way to access a still wider variety of investing strategies. As a former mortgage bond salesman as well, I could similarly wax poetic about a whole universe of investment vehicles with an alphabet soup of acronyms that, like an Elizabethan sonneteer declaring his undying devotion, would make you long to possess a super-senior CDO linked to a basket of credit default swap positions. Ah, financial innovation…But I digress. Where was I?
In sum, I’m actually a fan of financial technology, albeit with one important caveat that I think will link back to your original question, about whether the financial game is incorrigibly rigged for the Big Boys.
Not to be too John Kerry about it, but my answer is No, and Yes.
I infer that what you mean by “rigged” is the idea that insiders cheat in sufficient numbers to leave outsiders at a severe disadvantage when it comes to earning a fair and worthwhile return on capital.
I disagree. In my fifteen years in the financial industry I saw no evidence of widespread cheating. On the contrary, I can honestly say I trust “the system” in our country to treat outsiders far more fairly than any other industry I’m aware of. I would also trust our system in the US better than any other country’s financial system, based on quite a bit of anecdotal and experiential evidence across borders.
Where I would blanket-statement agree on the rigged part for your average outside investor, however, is in costs. The insiders depend on your ignorance of the cost of their product.
Most investment products designed in the past 50 years are compensation schemes for insiders.
Hedge funds are the most egregious example, of course, as knowledgeable insiders correctly and dismissively refer to hedge funds as ‘compensation schemes masking as investment vehicles.”
Products like retail ETFs, primary designed to encourage high-frequency day-trading, wrap up a casino-like product in an investing package, for the benefit of the house casino.
Even the mutual fund industry typically charges far more than is necessary to accomplish what are really simple tasks with minimal value-added.
Fees to insiders in all of these areas remain stubbornly high and extremely difficult to track down for the average outsider. In no other area of life do we willingly purchase a product costing many thousands of dollars without asking about the price of the product or attempting to price-shop the product.
I can’t emphasize enough how much of the inside game is devoted to convincing outsiders of the ‘special sauce’ of a particular investment vehicle. Contrary to what the insiders want you to believe, simple would generally be better and low cost would be best of all.
I linked to this page before, but it bears repeating. I have no link to this investment advisor, I’ve never met him, and I just found his stuff a month ago. Do yourself a favor, print out pages 9-12, post them on your bulletin board, and refer to them frequently when considering where and how to invest.
[1] He famously advised people to avoid eating anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Incidentally, my great-great-grandmother ate a lot of Nutella. In my own mind.
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