Sunday, October 28, 2018

The Wealthy Person's Eternal Dilemma

From Fred Schwed's Where are the Customers' Yachts? published over 75 years ago and still timely.

The underlying principle of the genuine investment counsel seems to be sound and important. It is a mundane one, i.e., it has to do with how the counselors are paid off. They receive a stated fee for giving advice; they do not get their pay in commissions or profits on trades, as most brokers and dealers do. Nor are they tempted to sell the client some security which they own and which, by a mischance, no one else at the moment seems to care to buy. Thus a wealthy person may at least feel sure that the advice he gets from investment counsel is sincere, and unbiased by hope of gain of fear of loss. This reduces the wealthy person's problems to two:

(l) Is there such a thing as consistently useful financial advice?

(2) If there is, which investment counselor can supply it?

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