Stephen Hagues – the Distribution revolution has moved.
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Stephen Hagues – the Distribution revolution has moved.
Stephen Hagues...The Distribution Revolution 
Yes abolsutely right, technocrats with no idea how to advise the private individual or business financially being given carte blanche to ruin the industry
Nice article, can’t argue with teh salesman analagy and rhetoric, but 1 minor flaw – columbus didn’t discover the Americas for the Europeans – The Vikings did. 🙂
Anybody who thinks they will survive longer than a couple of years as IFAs must be MAD.
The regulatory system is run by risk averse stalinist group who whilst being unaccountable to anyone, including parliament are continuing to manufacture prescriptive and contradictory rules whilst telling the wealth makers in the private sector how to run their own businesses. It doesn’t work!
That’s why we’re in the mess we are all in.
It’s all corruption and has a political agenda.
I’m not sure you are a contrarian – a true contrarian migrated to fees well ahead of the flock years ago. A true contrarian foresaw the property crash – the forum known as housepricecrash had threads entitled ‘the coming credit crunch’ back in 2004! That’s contrarianism. A true contrarian now suspects the economy is about to boom again as we go into 2013 ( not remain flat and steady as the idiotic sheep talking heads on the BBC are saying – why do experts always get it wrong? Remember these are the very same who did not foresee the credit crunch whereas lowly subjects on little forums did foresee precisely what was going to happen).
I was an IFA, but am now a mortgage broker and have always been largely fee based. I love doing the opposite of the crowd. If people perceive there is a value in a village blacksmith, they will pay for his services, however if they perceive too little value, they like you will cease to use the service.
Personally I disliked being an IFA, not because I wasn’t a success, I was, but because the whole commission model always felt corrupt and rancid to me, after all how would you feel if your GP recommended products and actions based on payments made to him by drug companies? How would you feel if your lawyer’s income was based upon legal indemnity insurance products he sold you?
The commission dinosaur was a passing bandwagon, and a rancid one at that. For example truly independent advice would be to recommend uber low charging investment products such as reputable ETFS, which pay no one anything really.
PEOPLE WILL WILLINGLY PAY FOR A SERVICE THAT CONFERS TRUE VALUE AND EXPERTISE – I mean real expertise, not tick boxing and bland reports from a platform. So for example a real handle on precious metal investing a couple of years back would be an example of properly valuable advice.
Most IFA’S I have met have no true and unrelenting passion for proper investing, the sorts of things real investors want to hear about. Flogging an AVIVA BOND is hardly ground breaking and requires no expertise at all although of course there is room for safer BUT LOW CHARGING investments. As an example on any course or convention you will see IFA’s reading footie pages and so fourth, they do not have their snouts buried in the FT seeking out and hovering up ‘insider’ investment information as they are so sheep like in their whole outlook, offering tired old insurance bonds and peddling commission paying packaged ‘investments’ from L&G.
So you wanted my thoughts – a bit of a ramble I’ll admit, but I just see the world differently to the IFA robots I meet.
The blacksmiths need to find something else to do. Make yourself a tower of investment knowledge in the way a consultant surgeon is perceived. Make investment knowledge your passion, not some tick box robotic selling exercise.
Cheers and good luck