Taking responsibility

Investors have a lot to answer for. Why are they not taking responsibility for their retirement, for example?

It may sound like a pointless comment, but at least one asset manager says that people work for years, day in and day out and they expect to retire comfortably. They don't enjoy working generally, hate their bosses, don't like their colleagues, and are generally unhappy, working for many is a means to an end- retirement.

The reality is that they dont take responsibility for their investment decisions.

When their retirement dawns on them they suddenly realise that they can't live according to the means to which they have become accustomed. They then scramble to find someone to blame- stand up the advisor, or perhaps the product provider.

The reality is that advisors rely on the asset managers and fund managers to provide them with reliable information, when their clients ask them to invest their hard-earned cash. The advisor has to sift through the marketing speak to get to grips with the actual offering, and then decide whether the client has truthfully answered the FNA questions.

It's as if the advisor has to be clairvoyant, mind reading their clients investment minds, and delving into the minds of the asset managers and their marketing people, to get to grips with fees, performance fees, benchmarks, high-water marks, and the like.

And then to confuse matters even more we see performance comparisons between the various unit trusts- more than 700 of them- all with one fatal flaw- they are historical results, with no indication of what will happen going forward, unless you are a long term investor or advisor who won't get sucked into taking a 'punt' on the fashionable asset class.