You will find that this site is about education and what is and is not important about investment success. This is a totally different site than you have ever visited before. How many investment sites would state:

That you are in a life and death struggle with the investment industry. The investment industry is built on people trading and the more they trade the better it is for them (not you).

We wholeheartedly agree with noted financial author- turned-investment advisor Dr. William Bernstein who puts it this way:

investment brokers service their clients the way Bonnie and Clyde serviced banks.

Author, writer Nick Murray writes:

You live in an investment culture where to be a successful investor you are told the key is to trade, to buy and sell. All this stock trading is for all intents and purposes, a conspiracy, a fraud.

It isn’t an active or a conscious conspiracy.

The heads of all the major banks, or fund companies have not met secretly with the editors of the Globe, Mac- Lean's, Forbes, Business Week nor with the program director’s of CBNC, Fox, Bloomberg, and the good folks at Morningstar.

It’s just that businesses, attempting to sell something for a profit, have independently arrived at the same conclusion: their business interests are best served by implicitly suggesting the benefits of stock and fund trading and market timing. On an average day CNBC interviews a dozen talking heads, in pairs:

• one is a bull and the other a bear
• one thinks oil prices will go up and the other down
• ditto for gold, the dollar, employment/unemployment, ad infinitum, ad nauseam

Many financial advisors have imbibed the Kool-Aid of trading. Many advisors have consciously and cynically offered this service to the people because they know it is what they will buy. Many advisors become witting or unwitting coconspirators in the propagation of the lies and distortions being "sold". This epiphany is best explained by these two quotes:

It’s like giving up a belief in Santa Claus.
Burton Malkiel

Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. It can't be done except by liars.
Bernard Baruch

GreatAdvisors.ca says:

Nobody can consistently pick hot funds nor the hot stocks of tomorrow. So be it. Let the rabble advisors compete with each other to give investors ever more grotesque services. Let them continue to say that they can help them pick the winners, the best investments of tomorrow. Great advisors have stopped making these silly promises.

BIGGEST PONZI SCHEME IN THE WORLD

The banking industry around the world has essentially lost a lot of its "trust". The perpetrators of possibly the biggest Ponzi scheme (Asset Backed Securities) the world has ever known was exposed and disgraced, bringing back memories of Richard Whitney in the 1930s.

The Questions:

• Should you do it yourself?
• What is the role of the financial advisor?
• What are investors biggest impediments for success?
• How to beat 90% of all money managers.
• What is our investment philosophy?
• Who is De Thomas Financial Corp.?
• Who is MRS Trust?
• How to lower fees and expenses.
• What is the optimum re-balancing strategy?
• How to lower your taxes

Advisory Business

The wind that blew down all the big banks may have also leveled the advisory playing field. That lone, independent advisor now stands as tall as any advisor at any big financial conglomerate. Amid all the daily doom in the papers, on radio and on TV, the trusted independent financial advisor may be the only voice of hope the client may hear.

That is really an awesome responsibility for a great advisor to bear.

Main Culprit

The main reason investors become unhappy is they were promised things that no-one could deliver, like picking the the best investments.

A great advisor never says that he can produce the highest return - a concept not only neurotic but chimerical, in that somebody, somewhere is always going to get a higher return.

A good advisor will turn his attention to the things that he can control:

• controlling investor emotions
• lowering taxes
• reducing trading activity
• having the proper asset allocation
• proper rebalancing techniques

Finally, more important than all the above wealth creators combined, the advisor will help control client’s psychological investment behaviour which is the real culprit to poor investor returns.

The emotional attitude and psychological behaviour of the investor is the most critical factor for investment success.

An investor must possess the ability to think independently.

Brad & Terrance Odean (from University of California) demonstrated in 1999 that the more often investors changed their portfolio, the lower their returns.

Richard Thaler (U of Chicago) and Shlomo Bernatzi (UCLA) found that the more often people looked at their portfolios, the lower their returns - apparently the more often you look, the more likely you will make changes.

The main benefit of a professional advisor is to protect the investor from costly and stupid mistakes.
Benjamin Graham