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Personal finance - Ghastly gurus - The best advice is to keep your wallet

2013-01-15 13:23:03

rlp

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. By

Helaine Olen. Portfolio; 292 pages; $27.95 and 17.99. Buy from Amazon.com,

Amazon.co.uk

Market Sense and Nonsense: How the Markets Really Work (and How They Don t). By

Jack Schwager. Wiley; 343 pages; $40 and 26.99. Buy from Amazon.com,

Amazon.co.uk

HAVE you ever met anyone who has grown rich just by saving? Probably not. But

you may well have met someone who has grown rich looking after other people s

savings. That dark secret lies at the heart of Pound Foolish , Helaine Olen s

excellent book, a contemptuous expos of the American personal-finance

industry.

With icy logic, Ms Olen, a journalist, demonstrates that much of the advice

given by moneymaking gurus on television or in print is either fatuous or based

on ridiculously optimistic assumptions about future investment returns. Take

the idea that saving the cost of a daily latte and investing the proceeds in

the stockmarket would make you rich. Saving $3 a day, or $1,100 a year, might

be a sensible economy measure but it won t build a fortune.

Such faddish ideas are the financial equivalent of miracle diets. A belief in

instant riches lured millions into buying internet stocks in the late 1990s or

overpriced houses in the middle of the past decade, when any personal-finance

adviser worth his salt should have been advising clients to run in the opposite

direction. But optimism sells, and realism tends not to.

As well as bad advice, the gurus have plenty of expensive products to flog from

courses that teach people how to become better real-estate investors to branded

goods like a $49.99 canvas laptop bag or a $34.98 silver leather wallet. By the

time clients have bought all the books, attended the courses and stocked up on

the accessories, someone has definitely become rich, though probably not the

saver.

Savers make all sorts of rookie mistakes from following the stock tips touted

on television to paying through the nose for complex financial products when

simple low-cost alternatives (like index-tracking funds) are available. And

debtors are similarly foolish, running up big bills on high-charging credit

cards. Perhaps such lessons could be rammed home by financial-literacy courses

but Ms Olen is cynical, noting that many courses are sponsored by

financial-services companies, creating an obvious conflict of interest.

Indeed, this is one of the central problems of personal finance how to get

advice to apathetic consumers. The unwillingness of consumers to pay for advice

has led to hard-selling, high-charging salesmen taking over the industry.

Britain has just reformed its payment system for financial advice and if Ms

Olen s book has a fault, it is the lack of an international perspective

offering such examples. The personal-finance pages of British newspapers are

doughty champions of consumer rights. While she rightly attacks the high-cost

annuities sold to American consumers, she might have reflected that the kind of

low-cost annuities sold in Britain ensure that retirees do not outlive their

savings.

But Ms Olen is right to home in on the biggest problem that personal-finance

gurus neglect; people earning $20,000 a year will struggle to pay for the

basics in life and will simply not be able to save their way to a life of

comfort, let alone riches. As Ms Olen concludes, We do not live in an economic

environment that will permit mass personal-financial progress, no matter how

well meant the guidance or advice.

Like Ms Olen, the latest book from Jack Schwager, best known for his Market

Wizards books based on interviews with traders and fund managers, takes a

potshot at TV stockmarket tipsters. A four-year analysis of the share

recommendations by Jim Cramer, star of CNBC s Mad Money , shows that while the

stocks rose on the day he mentioned them, they underperformed the market over

longer periods. The experts polled by Louis Rukeyser on Wall Street Week (a

programme on public television) proved to be almost perfect contrarian

indicators; they were most bullish in December 1999, at the peak of the dotcom

bubble.

Mr Schwager s book starts off with plenty of sound, basic advice beware of

assuming that past high returns can be maintained, for example before expertly

demonstrating that a leveraged exchange- traded fund (a fund that promises to

deliver an enhanced market return) is a dreadful investment because of its

structure, being almost bound to disappoint.

He then moves on to more sophisticated measures of risk, rightly pointing out

that faulty risk measurement is worse than no risk measurement at all, because

it may give investors an unwarranted sense of security. As the book develops,

beginners may start to struggle with mathematical concepts, such as Sortino and

Calmar ratios, that regularly get trotted out.

Oddly, this curate s egg of a book then veers off in a different direction a

lengthy description and defence of the hedge-fund industry. Mr Schwager

demonstrates that hedge funds are less risky than many mutual funds, but he

does not really deal with the central issue; that their fees are too high for

the returns they deliver. One suspects that Ms Olen would respond to his

conclusion that hedge funds are a desirable investment even for

unsophisticated, lower-net-worth individuals with a loud, and well-deserved,

raspberry.

from the print edition | Business books quarterly