How the Industry Expects You to Feel Good About Robotic Investing
If you’re like most of our clients, you don’t think about what’s going on in the Financial Services industry all that much. Mostly because you have hired us as your personal advisor and you are able to spend more time doing the things you actually love to do. It’s all about lifestyle, right?
But I just have to comment. As this article below explains, the industry is expecting clients to feel better and better about letting a computer know what is best for them but it isn’t working! How can a computer ever know that you work two jobs, or just had a baby, or just retired from 30 years of service from a company with complicated pension schemes? How can a computer know that you have multiple streams of income and your portfolio is only one of them? How can it know what your Social Security strategy is?
On the investment front – the article explains what clients really want is liquid and transparent strategies. No computer needed!
We don’t use complicated computer-driven models to help our clients navigate their wealth accumulation or retirement plans. We do use information. Information is found and parsed with computers but we still have to read the economic trends and be right. It doesn’t have to be complicated unless you are taking the risks associated with outsized returns. Our message? Stop even thinking about it. It’s not working! Low-interest rates and widespread access to information is making it difficult to read the tea leaves. What makes the most sense is to be well diversified and to take advantage of the normal market fluctuations that the stock markets invariably provide. Be a boy scout and always be ready. Those money-making fluctuations will always arrive but they may be few and far between.
We would rather make a return on our client’s money than ever have to try to just return the money. It’s hard work but it does work.