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Transparent Investing What your broker won't tell you |
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Welcome to Transparent Investing This entry was posted on 7/4/2007 1:30 PM and is filed under Welcome. Welcome to the blog for TransparentInvesting.com, a web site set up for investor education and consumer activism. As explained on the web site itself, the site was created to answer the flood of questions triggered by an article in the December 2006 issue of San Francisco magazine. Though Aperio Group, my employer, wasn’t seeking wealth management clients, we still wanted to provide some sort of help to the hundreds of people who had called us from all over the United States. One of my business partners at Aperio Group suggested that we offer a free seminar to show consumers 1) how to think about investing, 2) how to decide whether or not to hire an investment professional, and 3) how to shop for that advice if it’s so desired.
Even after we gave a three-hour free workshop in San Francisco in February, we kept receiving calls from lots of consumers calling in who had read the article and sought help. Many of them wouldn’t be able to make it to a free seminar, especially the many people who called from outside of California. The web site TransparentInvesting.com provides basically the same content as delivered at the free workshop. Among the challenges of such an educational web site are 1) what to include and 2) how complex the material should be. The choice of what material to include evolved not only out of many years of experience managing money and teaching graduate-level investment courses but also from the cry for help from those who called after reading the article. A consistent theme reverberated throughout the calls: “I have sensed that I’m not getting good value for the fees I’m paying, but I don’t really understand the fees, and I don’t know a better way to invest.” Out of that loud cry for help comes the need for consumers to pay a lot more attention to fees and taxes. The second challenge remains how complex to make the explanation, since there are lots of folks who just want a simple answer and hope to avoid a complicated and time-consuming explanation. I hope that those people will be served by the ten easy steps on the home page of the web site. On the other hand, there are lots of intense hobbyists who want all the details, as well as people with a healthy dose of skepticism as to whether the proffered advice rests on solid research and experience. The guide (the 50-page pdf file) should provide adequate background, perhaps overwhelmingly so, for those who want to dig down to the details and references. I’d like to hear back from users of the site as to how well the two paths, simple and detailed, succeeded in empowering consumers, which is the whole point of this project. Use the "Leave a comment" feature at the bottom of this and every posting on the blog. Based on ongoing user feedback I hope that TranparentInvesting.com can continue to evolve and become more user-friendly and accessible. My main goal here is to make consumers of investment products feel more empowered and to provide a kind of inoculation against the most unsavory sales practices of my profession. Please post on the blog with any feedback regarding that goal. Final Disclosure Piece I often recommend that it’s important to pay close attention to the economic incentive of anyone offering you advice. In the case of this web site, TransparentInvesting.com sells no products and offers no advice for compensation. In addition, Aperio Group LLC, the employer of Patrick Geddes, is not seeking wealth management clients, so no one is soliciting your business here. In the interest of full transparency, though, it remains true that Aperio Group, my employer, is in the money management business, and with an indexing orientation. If all consumers were to demand from their advisors lower fees and taxes through an indexed approach, then our firm would benefit. Thus I cannot claim that my opinions are absolutely unbiased. Still, I judge that indirect bias as mild compared to the investment industry that frequently wants to do its best to ensure that consumers don’t wake up to the fees and taxes they pay when compared to the overwhelming evidence against active management, which the industry continues to peddle because it’s so lucrative. CommentsDisplay comments as (Linear | Threaded)
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