As a user of various financial products over the years, I sometimes wonder what it is I 
actually own (most of the time this occurs sometime after hitting some single malt before bed and sometime before day break). I dunno — I read the labels on food that I ingest. Just thought it might be interesting to know what’s in the mutual fund into which I invested all my life’s savings. Just for kicks, you know?
So, I decided to do a little sleuth work and *pull back the covers* on the disclaimer language on some of the most widely held financial products. What I found written in Arial font size 6 might be a little surprising to owners of mutual funds and ETFs:
Of course, past results are not at all, in any way, form, or fashion indicative of future performance. No way and it doesn’t even matter that we have to say that. We probably would anyway just to cover our own asses. Anyway, in terms of performance, it’s really just a crapshoot. Who wrote that Random Walk thingie again? We’re not big fans of him (he’s probably an academic). We don’t love Bogle either — he’s the one who tried to force us into buy and hold strategies. Cramer’s more our speed, if you care. We sell/market financial products that trade in a secondary market so we don’t really care all that much anyway how they perform. As long as we grow our assets under management and provide liquidity to the products. In fact, we’re not quite sure what to make of all the blogger research that shows that our ETFs don’t come close to tracking the indices they’re supposed to follow. And those leveraged ones — the 2x, 3x, 4x, XXXs — who really understands how all those things work? I mean, can you really use daily future rebalancing as part of a core strategy anyway?? Thankfully for us, it’s products like these that enable us to raise our management fees in an environment that continuously pushes fees down. We had it good with mutual funds — whose stupid idea was to transition to lower-fee ETFs? By the way, if you really want performance, why not try just giving your money to one of those fancy hedge fund vehicles? They seem to know what they’re doing, right? Man, I’d like to be in their shoes. Me? I’d be David Tepper or maybe Bill Ackman. Yeah, Ackman. With his build and that gray heirhair, he’s totally a baller investor. Also, you should know, that we don’t really believe all that new-fangled behavioral research that shows that for investors, our products are sort of like drugs in the hands of addicts. In essence, there’s no way these people are going to make money in the market anyway. So, why not provide a vehicle that purports to do as much. Is that so bad? Is it?
Wow, who knew what was written in all that small print?
photo courtesy of somegeekintn