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Best way to trade the rumors? Bloomberg (and Tradestream) says short ’em

To a philosopher, all news as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea — Henry David Thoreau

Gossip is called gossip because it’s not always the truth — Justin Timberlake

With stocks, there is so much noise and pumping going on that investors can feel like they’re at a Motley Crue concert again.  So, how do investors using smart strategies and historical data profit from rumors?

Bloomberg is out with proprietary data today that suggests shorting stocks caught up in merger rumors is a viable, profitable strategy.

Electronic news services, brokerages and newspapers reported at least 1,875 rumors about potential buyouts of 717 companies between 2005 and 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A total of 104, or 14.5 percent, were acquired, the data show. While stocks that were the subject of takeover speculation initially jumped 2.9 percent, betting on declines yielded average profits of 1.2 percent in the next month, an annualized gain of 14 percent.

In Tradestream, I devote an entire chapter, Grind the Rumor Mill, to rumor mongering and how that plays out for investments – essentially short-selling a basket of M&A rumors.  This strategy works because while real acquisition targets see above-average appreciation, most rumored M&As don’t actually come to fruition.

I included a rumor model developed by Nudge’s Cass Sunstein that he used in his recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done (affiliate link).  This included identifying propagators, qualifying their prior beliefs, and predicting the cascading effect from any change/reinforcement of those priors.

Much of the guts and data behind this strategy was documented by Gao and Oler in “Rumors and Pre-Announcement Trading: Why Sell Target Stocks Before Acquisition Announcements?” (June 2008)

Data

The Strategy

  • Research: Scan the WSJ’s Heard on the Street for reported, but unsubstantiated merger and acquisition rumors
  • Adjust for market cap: The strategy works better when you remove companies with market cap >$20B
  • Short basket trade: Short sell a basket of these rumored targets and hold for 70 days after the rumor first appeared.  Cover.  Hedge if you like.
  • Timing best for hot M&A years: if M&A heats up (like now, right), the data show the strategy works even better

Last thing

The Bloomberg research found that this short-the-rumor strategy worked (+14%) even when it coincided with other contradictory bullish signals like call buying.

Call volume in New York-based Jefferies Group Inc. jumped amid unconfirmed takeover reports on Feb. 27, 2008. Calls on the company changed hands 12,692 times that day, 24 times the four- week average and the most in almost a year, and the shares gained 3.7 percent. A deal never occurred and Jefferies dropped 3.4 percent the next day, 10 percent the next week and 20 percent in 30 days. The S&P 500 lost 4.7 percent in a month.

Caveat emptor: I have not actually used this strategy in portfolios (I’m pretty much long only) and I think it would take balls of steel to really stick to it.

Further Reading on Investing and Rumors:

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Is patent peace good for NVDIA and Intel?

While giant chip maker Intel ($INTC) has continued to make the best mass-market PC based semiconductors, it’s had lots of smaller competition nipping at its heels throughout its history.  My favorite has always been NVidia ($NVDA) — a maker of great cutting-edge technology used in high-end computers and game consoles.

The two firms (Intel is 10X in marketcap) inked an agreement in 2004 to share some technology that Intel felt needed to be updated as new technology came to market.  Well, they finally agreed on a new structure entitling NVDA to $1.5B in licensing fees over the next 5 years and providing access to each others’ new technology.

This agreement signals a new era for NVidia. Our cross license with Intel reflects the substantial value of our visual and parallel computing technologies. It also underscores the importance of our inventions to the future of personal computing, as well as the expanding markets for mobile and cloud computing — NVidia president and chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang (Xinhuanet)

The market liked the news and NVDA has seen its stock rise 34% in 2011 alone.  But is inking this deal with the 800lb Intel really good news for NVDA?

Here’s a primer:

  • Intel needed access to NVidia’s tech, too

…the agreement shows that Intel sees the importance of the graphics processing technology that Nvidia dominates. Those sorts of chips are used in everything from smartphones to automobiles to television sets (San Jose Mercury News)

…Nvidia’s own graphics processing units are now challenging Intel’s chips as all-purpose processors and Nvidia is moving towards greater involvement in mobile computing, with chips based on the architecture of the UK’s Arm, rather than Intel’s x86 processor designs (FT)

…Microsoft ($MSFT) in turn, announced that its next version of Windows would be ARM compatible. Whether that turns “Wintel” into “Winvidia” won’t be known for several years when Nvidia’s ARM processor is ready for the market, but the announcement did strike a psychological blow against the old order of things (Fortune)

  • Certain analysts are focused on what wasn’t part of the deal

But the subtext of what wasn’t part of the deal is also compelling…Nvidia has long been rumored to be trying to dip its toes in the processor market. The fact that Nvidia didn’t get the rights to Intel’s processor designs reinforces that Nvidia plans to take a different path to take on Intel. That path involves licensing a different design that is already popular for phones and other mobile devices. (NPR)

  • It’s now all about mobile computing

As computing becomes more about entertainment and less about productivity a host of companies are making their moves to make computing, fun, mobile and power efficient. But don’t expect Intel to give up its dominant role in the industry any time soon. (gigaOM)

  • INTC validating NVDA’s parallel processing tech

Nvidia specializes in processors that are ideal for processing complex graphics and has been promoting them to be used for other complicated mathematical tasks, such as medical imaging and weather forecasting. While traditional central processors found in PCs are designed to make huge calculations very quickly, one after another, graphics processors, or GPUs, excel at carrying out several small calculations at the same time, which makes them handy for specific kinds of tasks. Nvidia has been talking about the world needing a parallel processor and it seems Intel is validating their technology (CNBC)

Regardless, most analysts see this as a win-win for both firms with demand for next-generation chips ramping as mobile computing sucks up existing supplies.  Whether it’s for offensive or defensive reasons, with this new agreement in hand, both INTC and NVDA look to benefit going forward.

photo courtesy of JD Hancock
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The Future of Investing, Startups, and the $11,000,000,000,000 Question

Online finance lags

The news of personal finance tool Wesabe shutting down last year made it pretty clear that Mint.com is on its way to fully owning the online personal finance space.  The company’s port-mortem pretty much capitulates that.  But personal finance is just a small part of a much larger, overarching problem that affects all of us: planning for a financial future.  While this certainly includes managing household cash flows, it also involves buying a home, choosing 401(k) plans, putting money into the stock market and fixed income investments, and planning for retirement.

This begs the question: with so much money at stake, why does online finance continue to trail other industries like travel? When planning an international trip online, I know exactly whom to trust for advice and why they’re trustworthy, where to look to compare similar products, and have transactional platforms into which to submit my order.  But in finance, most people still don’t even know where to begin.

Hedge fund traders are using supercomputing high-frequency trading tools to make money in good markets and bad while we still can’t even decide which mutual funds are right for us. We require truly comprehensive solutions instead the current piecemeal, silo-based approach in online finance.  At stake is our future and over $11 trillion of mutual fund assets in the U.S.

Current Players

You can look at the way competition is shaping up online in various silos:
  • Personal Finance: Startups in this space are focused on developing value-added services to help users track and manage money flows.
    • Tracking/Tweaking: Mint.com has done really well capturing new users to adopt web/mobile tools, just as Quicken was a similarly powerful force on the PC.  Intuit, which now owns both products, is positioned really well for future expansion.   Personal finance is a huge problem to tackle and it’s really early in the game.
  • Investing: The investing process involves researching various options, transacting, and ongoing portfolio management with analytic tools.
    • Researching: Investors begin the investment process with idea discovery, bubbling up ideas to populate their portfolios.
      • Piggybacking investment ideas: New services like AlphaClone not only make easier tracking of the investment activities of storied investors like Warren Buffett but also provide portfolio development tools to backtest and manage entire portfolios made up of piggybacked ideas.
      • Long tail of financial content: As the costs of publishing have been pushed to zero, we’re enjoying a bull market in investment content.  Sites like Seeking Alpha and StockTwits provide great tools to plug into the collective tradestream. Wikinvest has taken more of a collaborative approach with its content and data.
      • Screening 2.0: Smarter tools like Validea help investors filter through large numbers of stocks using algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify worthy portfolio prospects.
      • Crowdsourcing stock picks: Sites like Piqqem allow investors to tap the wisdom of the investment crowds.
      • Expert networks: SumZero is an online investing club of super-smart people sharing really good analysis on stocks.  Other Q&A tools like those at LinkedIn and Quora and even Facebook are enabling the sourcing of ideas from domain experts.  With the FBI/SEC’s crackdown on offline expert networks, investors will look more towards these tools for help in sourcing and validating investment ideas.
    • Transacting: Once an investor knows what action he would like to take, execution comes next.
      • Online Brokers: E*Trade, TDAmeritrade, and Schwab still dominate the online brokerage space (with recent news that Merrill Lynch is getting back into the game).  It’s interesting to watch as online brokers woo existing traditional brokerage clients with automated, professional-grade services delivered online, blurring the line between full-service and DIY investing.
      • Hybrids: Covestor and kaChing (now Wealthfront) are the eBays of investment advisory services — marketplaces of investment services.  Users synch their online brokerage accounts to mirror the portfolio models managed by advisors on these platforms.  In a move to the mainstream, Covestor’s tradestream now includes the real time audited trades from participating investment managers.  This is a big fuckin’ deal and it’s freely available through Yahoo Finance’s Market Pulse.  Newer entrants like Tech Crunch Disrupt finalist Betterment provide automated investment services.  Other investment advisors like Formula Investing provide a mixture of full service and DIY tools.
    • Managing:
      • Ongoing monitoring:  As markets undulate and investors’ financial health changes, tools help automate changes that should be made in portfolios.  A number of new professional-grade, automated tools are helping head this cause.  Firms like MarketRiders help with ongoing changes in asset allocation and services like Goalgami help address life’s incessant barrage of financial goals that need planning.
      • New asset managers: Fusing the low-cost distribution model that social media affords with new methodologies to manage funds for clients, both old and new asset managers are launching all kinds of new securities in an attempt to capture part of a huge pie.  With actively managed ETFs in the infancy and good comps for successful exits, new asset managers like GlobalX are growing AUM and positioning themselves well for future growth.
      • Analytics:  Like Google’s Urchin/Analytics acquisition, analytics are core to the effective management of any platform.  TC Tear Down star, Steve Carpenter founded and sold Cake Financial to E*Trade earlier in 2010.  Cake helped investors make more sense of the activities in their portfolios. With Cake Financial bowing out, the market is wide open.  Look to Wikinvest’s recently launched Portfolio tool to take off where Cake left off.

Why there is still a huge window of opportunity

In spite of the flurry of activity, most of these startups haven’t even begun to dent the market for financial services.  Some of these verticals are so narrow that participants need to expand horizontally  into other silos, which both incumbents and startups are racing to do.

Some firms have advanced product-based approaches, trying to build better mutual fund mousetraps and have enjoyed a modicum of success. Next-generation mutual funds, exchange traded funds (ETFs) have almost $800 billion in assets, an increase of 34% over 2009 levels, but that’s still only 7% of all invested assets in the U.S.  In spite of all the high quality content, investors still struggle with basic financial concepts, portfolio management, and continue to make bad decisions.  The flurry of activity has unleashed a bull market in financial content; We’ve gone from scarcity to too much content.  We now require tools to cut through the data smog and help us with comprehensive solutions to make better decisions.

The $11,000,000,000,000 Grand Prize goes to…

The market size of the investment industry is so big that there is room for multiple players to establish hugely profitable businesses.  Look for large incumbent players, most specifically Bloomberg, to expand their businesses through acquisition in an attempt to capture more marketshare.  Bloomberg’s multi-billion dollar empire of financial hardware and data recently purchased BusinessWeek in an attempt to move downstream toward retail investors.  The giant investment expert network, Gerson Lehrman Group, may get deeper into online expert Q&A sourcing as the firm continues to enable person-to-person expert research for professional investors.

Real-time transparency is making  its way to the online brokers.  E*Trade joined TDAmeritrade in recently announcing upgrades to its own API to allow 3rd party software developers and services to reach investors through their brokerage logins – the holy grail for the entire value chain.  Investors get access to new apps, software developers can finally tap online brokerage clients through trading platforms, and the online brokers can provide value-added services without having to develop them.

The fact that we’re beginning to seeing ivory-tower asset managers make their way onto Twitter is, in fact, a good sign of things to come in the future.  But the field is still wide open for comprehensive solutions.

photo courtesy of frankblacknoir
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Output volume and velocity trending up at top investment sites

From Mick:

High volume biz publishers: @businessinsider is averaging 1015 posts/week and @seekingalpha 1033 (Google Reader stats for last 30 days)

That’s amazing — not only in sheer volume but in breadth.  Admittedly, a lot of what’s going up is crap and some of it has nothing to do with business/investing (I’m thinking BusinessInsider’s gratuitous slideshows).  It’s a deluge of content.

There is definitely something in the long tail of financial content for everyone.  There is absolutely no excuse anymore for investors not to better themselves or pick better investment/financial advisors to represent them.

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Tradestream pair trade: long Broadway, short concerts

While 2010 was a really down year for the music industry in terms of tickets/revenues for live shows, Broadway seems to be enjoying a bull market of sorts.

Fewer concert tickets were sold for less money — about 15% down.
Year End Top Worldwide Concert Tours

From Pollstar

The Top 50 Tours Worldwide grossed a combined $2.93 billion which was

down about 12% from last year’s $3.34 billion. Total tickets sold was 38.3 million which was down about 15% or 7 million from 2009’s 45.3 million. Total show count was down about 8% to 2,650. The only number to increase was the average ticket price which went up $2.86 or about 4%.

While Bon Jovi enjoyed his success as top concert music attraction, his peers suffered.  I have to believe Facebook, reality TV, a crappy economy, and the rise of heavily produced/autotuned bubble gum performers have all inhibited couch potatoes from getting out there and partying like it’s 1999.

While this is bad for the industry, there is a silver lining for concert-goers:

If your idea of happiness is seeing a band that tours constantly in a slightly smaller venue than it played in the last time it came through town, for significantly less money, 2011 could plaster a perma-smile onto your face. If you want to see Bon Jovi or Roger Waters or Dave Matthews or The Eagles or any of the other artists in Pollstar‘s Top 50, who routinely sell out large venues at high premiums — or if you tend to steer clear of the big arenas in favor of smaller bands in cozier rooms — 2011 might seem like more of the same.

Broadway bucks bad economy, couch potatoes

The same can’t be said about Broadway, though. According to the NY Times, Broadway

enjoyed a Boffo year in 2010 (although sales were up merely 3%).

Shows grossed a total of $1.037 billion in the 2010 calendar year compared to $1.004 billion in 2009, according to statistics compiled by the Broadway League, the trade group of theater owners and producers. Roughly 12.11 million people saw a Broadway show in 2010, while 11.95 million went in 2009.

This could just be another case of the different realities Wall Street and Main Street are occupying now.  Theater ticket prices routinely hit $250-$350 a pop for premium seating (which makes taking the wife and 5 kids out, well, prohibitively expensive).

Investors in concerts

LiveNation ($LYV) is the the world’s largest live concert producer, by market capitalization, having merged with Ticketmaster in early 2010.  It produced nearly 22,000 concerts for 2,000 artists in 42 countries during 2009.  It had a rocky 2010 but ended up about 30% for the year.

Source:

Top Tours 2010 (Pollstar)

How the Disasterous 2010 Concert Season Could Work in Your Favor (NPR)

A Boffo Year for Broadway (NY Times)

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What the fat IPO pipeline means for investors

The size of the opportunity

We’re gearing up for some really interesting activity in the IPO market in 2010.  To put things in perspective, in 2010, IPOs returned 72% more money than the companies that exited in 2009 (although at $40B, that’s still about 40% less than peak levels in 2007).

According to Sarah Lacy’s recent article in TechCrunch, Exits Lag in the 4th Quarter, but IPO Hype Boils for 2011:

There is a lot of hype swirling that 2011 is going to be the big comeback year for the venture-backed IPO. And we’re talking about big, gaudy IPOs, not small ones that essentially function as another funding round. And interestingly, pundits and investors expect some new $1 billion companies to debut in both cleantech and Internet sectors.

Certainly firms like LinkedIn, Groupon, Facebook, Pandora, and Zynga have raised lots of VC money from investors who would welcome public liquidity.

Private Equity also benefits from IPO window

Venture backed firms — those started from scratch and basically birthed into existence for large splashy IPOs — aren’t the only ones benefiting from the opening of the IPO window for increased investor demand in new offerings.  Companies that received funding/buyouts from private equity firms are also gearing up for an exciting 2011.

According to Renaissance Capital

The past year has seen an modest uptick in offerings of companies backed by buyout firms – 37 in total, more than the two previous years combined

Big firms like HCA, TXU, and Harrah’s Entertainment are poised, waiting for the right opening to go public and make their PE-backed investors richer.

But…

It’s not all clear sailing for a couple of reasons

  1. time and money to exit:  In spite of the rah-rah of VCs saying how easy and quick it is for companies to prosper in the social media era, the inverse is actually true — successful companies may require more money and time to prepare for public markets.  According to TechCrunch’s Lacy, “The venture-backed economy is rapidly becoming polarized between quick flips or a long, hard-fought slogs even for the hottest companies.”
  2. fuzzy pricing for private firms: Investors in pre-public firms frequently talk their books, inflating performance and valuation of their portfolio companies.  Without a public mechanism to discover pricing, it’s hard to line up institutional investors for a large offering. The NYT has an article today about energy company, TXU and how pricing analysis by KKR and TPG has differed wildly.
  3. rise of secondary markets: Companies like SharesPost have provided necessarily outlets for founders and investors to cash out.  With the ability to take some money off the table and enrich themselves, certain companies would rather persist as private firms without the necessary headaches and scrutiny of running publicly-traded firms. Xpert Financial, recently launched, will play into this dynamic as well.  It’s possible that Facebook doesn’t go public for a loooong time.

Performance into 2011

While total IPO numbers still haven’t returned to 2007 levels in the US, performance is best since 2006, as average IPO rose by 23% this year.  Renaissance Capital is predicting a big year in small cap tech, consumer, and health care sectors.

Given last year’s result and if we see continued momentum, Asia Pac and Latin America look poised to not only float more new firms but good firms, with nice sized returns.

And this makes sense.  Many of the hottest Internet firms continue to find willing and able investors in the venture capital world (and out, as witnessed by Goldman’s interest in Facebook).  Other firms that have spent the past few years developing great products and even more interesting business models will tap the markets because they’re ready to grow into being real firms.

Source:

Exits Lag in the 4th Quarter, but IPO Hype Boils for 2011 (TechCrunch)

Buyout Firms Look for Easier Exits in New Year (Dealbook)

A Portfolio’s Price (NY Times)

DowJones data on 2010 transactions (DowJones)

Xpert Financial Offers Start-Ups an IPO Alternative (gigaOM)

Why Facebook won’t go public (Felix Salmon/Reuters)

2010: The Year in IPO Dealflow and Performance (The Reformed Broker)

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Could the rise of the minivan signal good things for autos?

OK, OK, I think the marketing of new minivans has gotten away from itself.  Breaking the stigma of the vehicle of choice for soccer moms, new adverts use heavy metal and romance to lure new buyers But, according to the NY Times, this edgy messaging to rebrand the minivan as something really cool is working.

Analysts credit the Toyota campaign with helping to increase sales of the Sienna by 18.5 percent through November — double the industry average for minivans and a rare bright spot for Toyota, whose overall sales have been flat since bad publicity over product recalls.

Sales of the Honda Odyssey are up 42 percent since October, when the 2011 model and new ad campaigns were introduced.

Swagger Wagon

Super Metal Honda Odyssey 2011

The auto industry has climbed back from the abyss and seems to be making a go at building profitable businesses.

Just for kicks, check out the Swagger Wagon Lyrics:

[INTRO MOM AND DAD]

Yeah

This one goes out to all you minivan families out there.
Sienna SE…in the house.
Where my mother/fathers at?
Where my kids at?

Where my kids at?
Where my kids at?
Where my kids at?
Where my kids at?
Where my kids at?

No, seriously honeywhere are the kids?
They’re right there, see?
Oh, cool beans. (Read more at Will Minivans Rise Again)

Source:
Mocked as uncool, the minivan rises again (NY Times)

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Stock markets continue to lose share to private exchanges

Institutional investors with large blocks of shares to sell don’t just open up an account at E*Trade and dump them into the market.  Doing so tips their hands and astute short sellers can hop a ride on stocks being disposed, making money along the way and reducing profits for the institutional seller.

Conversely, if an institution wants to accumulate shares in a relatively thinly traded stock, they can’t go out to a retail stock broker and say, “Hey buddy, get me 10 million shares of that hot new small cap tech stock.”  Doing so would cause the price to rise just by announcing such intentions.

How Institutional Investors Trade

To handle insitutional volumes of stock trading, traders do the following

  1. VWAP: Some traders will program trading software to purchase a maximum % of volume on given days (called VWAP or Volume Weighted Average Price).
  2. Smaller trades at various brokers: Sometimes traders will parcel out trades to multiple brokers to mask the fact that a large number of shares are being traded by one institution.
  3. Dark pools: And sometimes, when there is really an impetus to sell/buy a large chunk of stock, traders will go to their brokers and ask them to cross a block of shares on the low — by not going too public with the info.  Execution speed is paramount here and the action is as much in the data centers in New Jersey as it is on Wall Street.  These dark pools now account for 1 in 3 shares of stocks traded according to the Wall Street Journal.

In ‘Dark Pools’ Pick up Stock Trading Share, the WSJ takes aim at the rise in these dark pools.

The rise of so-called dark pools and other off-exchange strategies aimed at large banks and institutional traders comes as regulators on both sides of the Atlantic grapple with balancing the market efficiencies the alternative venues say they generate with the impact on individual investors.

Private venues are seen as a more efficient way for transacting large chunks of shares, but critics worry that if so much trading is done privately, publicly available prices set by exchanges will become less accurate. Dark pools are electronic platforms designed for institutions to carry out major stock trades anonymously.

Varying forces

Having 30% of trading beyond the veil of regulators and common investors creates a tiered trading system, something inherently seen as unfair and anti-competitive.  The emergence of internal stock trading platforms like powerhouse BlackRock recently announced are not new, they’re just taking on more volume and therefore, importance.  In general, we’re witnessing the rise of the machines and algorithmic trading which is the purest combination of technology and investing.  The stock exchanges like NASDAQ OMX ($NDAQ) and NYSE Euronext ($NYX) are pleading and crying to regulators to help right this wrong.

Beyond the histrionics, the stock exchanges are also developing technology to help lure institutions back to their platforms.  The NASDAQ OMX CEO was on Forbes recently touting the work they’ve done on PSX, an exchange that doesn’t give preference only to speed but also to size of trades.  This platform has already demonstrated its ability to bring many of the institutional trades happening offline, back online.

As Felix Salmon said in Wired, “In the wake of the flash crash, Mary Schapiro, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, publicly mused that humans may need to wrest some control back from the machines.”

‘Automated trading systems will follow their coded logic regardless of outcome while human involvement likely would have prevented these orders from executing at absurd prices.’

Giving up control to the computers is not really what’s at stake here.  Computer trading just reflects the rules-based logic entered by the humans who program the algos.  Rather, it’s the essential bifurcation of the markets: one for pros and one for the rest of us.  It’s the unleveling of the playing field at stake here that should have everyone concerned.

Source:

Dark Pools Pick up Stock Trading Share (WSJ)

Algorithms take control of Wall Street (Wired)

BlackRock to launch trading platform (FT.com)

photo courtesy of tenaciousme
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Retail Brokerage Manifesto

I’ve been in the investment business for 10 years now wearing a variety of hats.  I’ve been a hedge fund analyst (small cap/tech/retail/food), ran business development for Seeking Alpha, and hold both a brokerage rep license (Series 7) and an investment advisory license (Series 65).

For the nuanced, a broker makes a living transacting stuff and an advisor is prohibited from doing this.  Even though the vast majority of my business is done as a fee on assets (not based on commissions), it’s sometimes strange wearing both hats.  I approach the business as an investment advisor would but typically manage accounts under my brokerage license — this allows me to develop unique portfolios for individual clients.  It’s inherently less scalable than an one-size-fits-all portfolio but it’s also good service and good business.

As I reflect on the past and plan for the future, I’d like to share the tenets of how I personally approach the business of investments.  It’s the creed I live by and it’s what helped me continue to grow.  Some of this is required by law, regulatory statute or is just plain my opinion.

Tradestreaming Broker’s Manifesto

  1. I don’t believe it’s inherently wrong being paid to manage client assets, even if I get paid a commission
  2. That’s because I always have the client’s best interest in mind
  3. Even if it conflicts with my own personal financial incentives
  4. Even if I *lose money* on the trade (independent reps have transaction costs on trades that they need to cover)
  5. I always told myself that in spite of the power a broker has over client decision making, I would never hard sell anything
  6. Always look for ways for clients to save money
  7. That may mean comparing Mutual Fund A vs. Mutual Fund B but it also means comparing Mutual Fund A vs. ETF A (one pays a trailer, the other is a transaction)
  8. Nobody says anyone needs to be in the market or needs to have a 60/40 portfolio
  9. The extension of this is that the best client performance sometimes comes from designing a portfolio from the ground-up, not top down and not by cramming a client into a pre-ordained portfolio or allocation
  10. I don’t believe in the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and do believe that clients can do better than the markets without having to assume more risk
  11. That said, while the potential to beat the market exists, it may be elusive and in specific cases, may not be worth trying
  12. Sometimes an honest broker makes his money by keeping clients out of trouble and that’s worth something, too, even if clients don’t necessarily recognize this
  13. There are a lot of brokers making their clients a lot of money and really doing good by them.  I want to be part of this group.
  14. Everyone in financial services has conflicts of interests and how you get paid is just one of them.  Regardless of licensing structure, good financial advice requires being honest and open with yourself and clients.
  15. Clients don’t begrudge their advisors making money and some feel good giving the business even if they could transact using an online broker
  16. But they won’t forgive if it’s done at their expense
  17. That said, very few clients could rightfully decipher if this was the case so the whole thing rests upon the broker/advisor being honest and open with him/herself.
  18. There aren’t many of us who behave as we do and that’s OK.

Do you have anything to add? Let me know in the comments.

photo courtesy of battlecreekCVB