Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The Outsider Code and Exchange Traded Funds

If you are like the majority of hard-working, permanently employed people you will have spent your working life being urged by your government to save for your retirement and to put money by for your children's education and to invest in a home. In fact, most of the money you have ever earned has probably been channeled one way or another along these routes.

The financial markets have produced a huge array of products that compete for the business of taking your money and investing it to achieve these objectives. And because the government assumes that you are too ignorant or feckless to choose the right products for yourself it recommends, or indeed insists, that you use the services of a financial adviser when buying one of the products.

Accordingly, financial advisers and the products they sell are subject to massive regulations designed to limit what you can do with your money. This is supposedly designed for your own protection. The government does not want you frittering away your money on unsuitable financial products, losing most of it and then becoming dependent on the state in your old age. The message is that financial advisers have the expertise that you lack to direct and invest your money and that if you stick to the system you will be safe.

But guess what? It does not work.

The past ten years (25% or 30% of most people's career spans) have demonstrated that they system does not deliver the benefits it is supposed to deliver. Because the system was designed in the days when everyone assumed that the markets would continue to rise. Or at worst, would always recover to former levels after any temporary downturn. This is demonstrably no longer true. Some of the biggest banks in the world have gone bust. Well known fund managers have been exposed as criminals. Retirement funds have imploded.

For example, if you have a pension or savings account invested in, say, mutual funds, there is a 90% chance that not only is your fund way short of its projected value but it is worth less than the amount of money you have paid into it. And this is despite the fact that you have employed a qualified financial adviser, allowed him to cream off generous commissions, taken every word of his advice and done everything, absolutely everything, that the government advised you to do.

When you look at your financial statements and survey the wreckage of your supposed wealth it can make you feel like you have been robbed. Which is exactly what has happened. You have been robbed by a dishonest and corrupt system which depends on extortion for its existence and ignorance for its enforcement.

How does this make you feel? There are two types of responses to this situation. The first is to shrug your shoulders and retreat into the delusion that the market, and your money, will eventually recover and all will be well. The second response is to get mad.

When you get mad and you investigate further you'll discover that your highly paid financial adviser is little more than a salesman and has no particular expertise or experience in investing money. You will discover that fund managers are more concerned to protect their bonuses than invest your money wisely. And when you look at the regulations that are supposed to safeguard you you will find that they are worthless: there is no guarantee that your obedience to the system has protected your money at all.

In fact, you will discover that you are on your own. The systems and safeguards that are supposed to provide the security for your money patently do not work. Your hard-earned savings have been squandered away by greedy, incompetent knuckleheads propped up by a system that is impotent to safeguard you.
The lesson is clear. You must take control of your own money. You must become independent of the legalized theft that is the financial services market and you must assume responsibility for the management of your own capital. There are many, little-known financial instruments now available to independent, private investors that enable them to do just that. You owe it to yourself and your family to investigate the route to financial freedom that will enable you to rebuild your wealth.
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