“Markets are mainly driven by narcissists, charlatans, consultants, snake oil salesmen tarot card readers and other self-proclaimed evangelists and gurus who believe they are blessed with numinous visionary powers. Ultimately nobody has a clue. Your average housewife could outperform most FMs and wouldn’t need the champagne or fast cars. Occasionally one of these soothsayers gets it right – a la broken clock. When you realise stupidity is the fundamental driver of behaviour, that’s where the opportunities are at.”
This was an FT reader comment about this article in the FT. Wealth managers grapple with one of their worst years in a century
You may not agree or like the comments, but one point is correct. Predicting the future is impossible. Of course, some may make good calls from time to time but making the right calls more often than not, well, that’s improbable.
Sometimes the job of wealth managers is to stop their clients from losing money, yet as the FT article explains….“Looking at it rather simply, many private investors could have lost more than a quarter of their real inflation-adjusted wealth,” said de Planta, citing the example of a portfolio split evenly between bonds and stocks.”
It is clear that simply delegating your money to wealth managers without professional oversight is foolhardy.