from seekingalpha.com:
The Asset Allocation Lie starts like this, "Studies have shown that over the long-term it is not your individual investments that determine your investment results, but your investment allocation." Now let's step back and think on this for a second. Warren Buffet is generally considered the greatest investor ever. In one sentence, every Financial Advisor has just belittled and indeed, insulted his life work. They have not only insulted his investment decisions and results of the past six decades, but also his lifelong desire to teach the public at large about how to invest appropriately. This insult continues on to his shareholders who invested in his company on the belief that they might reap excess investment rewards in the future. Every Hedge Fund Manager, every Portfolio Manager, that has utilized proper stock selection, like Mr. Buffet, as their investment strategy and has achieved success with that investment strategy is being insulted. Every one of their investors, who invested with them in the belief that they could utilize proper stock selection as an investment strategy, is also being insulted. And there is one final person who is also insulted by this entirely false concept, and that is: everyone else, literally. Every individual investor who has not invested with or even heard of Warren Buffet is being insulted by almost every financial firm and advisor in the industry since these strategies, enacted by the successful investment managers, are not being presented as options to the public at large. This is the Lie.
Then there is the Deception. The Deception uses the Lie to get you, the unknowing individual, to trust the Financial Advisor (or more accurately described, the Salesperson) and utilize their services as well as their firm. Because as long as you don't know about the other, more effective investment strategies of elite investment managers, you'll turn your money over to idiots. The idiots are active investment managers who are incapable of beating relevant benchmarks over a reasonably significant period of time.
Finally, there is the Steal. The firm and the advisor charge what seems to be a "low fee" in relation to historical returns, but is in fact a very high fee for the actual services they perform for the client. This "low fee" grows over time as you save and invest more capital and have some positive investment returns. As the "low fee" grows, the compensation to the firm and advisor grows while they continue to do effectively nothing. This is the second part of the joke in action, "But if you steal a little bit of money, from a large segment of people over an extended period of time, you get rich." Who gets rich? Not the client, but the firm and the advisor.
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