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If you are like most diligent professionals you will probably have taken the government's advice to make provision for your retirement, and to look ahead to fund your children's education and to enter the property market to provide a family home. Most likely, most of the money you have ever made has gone to fund these undertakings. The free financial markets have produced a huge array of products that compete for the business of taking your money and investing it to achieve these objectives. And because the government chooses to assume that you are too ignorant or feckless to choose the right products for yourself it recommends, or indeed insists, that you use the services of a financial adviser when buying one of the products. There are a mass of complex regulations which limit and prohibit what you can do with your money. This, we are told, is for your own good and to protect you from harm. The government doesn't want you to risk your money by using unsuitable investments and then lose it all. The government doesn't want to have to support you in old age. So it steers you in the direction of financial advisors who, it implies, know much better than you do what to do with your money. If you do as you are told, your money will be safe and you will get rich. The only snag is, it hasn't worked like that. The last few years (spanning a big chunk of your working life) have shown that the markets can go down as well as up, taking your money with them. In the old days, people assumed the markets would indefinitely rise. Or, if they didn't, it wouldn't take long for a bounce to happen and the value would quickly recover. Well, as we have seen, this is tragically not the case. Merchant banks have filed bankruptcy, fund managers have been convicted of massive fraud, retirement funds have disappeared. You will have seen the effects yourself if, for example, you have investments in a mutual fund. Has it performed according to the projections you were led to expect? No way - in fact, it may even have contracted, maybe by as much as 50% (or more). It's probably worth less than the amount of money you've paid in. Which doesn't say a lot for the reputation of the qualified financial advisor who managed your funds, or the fund managers who invested your money. All they have done for your wealth is to deplete it by charging you big commissions for destroying it. When you look at how the money that you thought would secure your future has been mishandled it feels like you've been swindled. And that's exactly what has happened. You have been cheated by a system that has proven to be dishonest and which relies on its customers' ignorance for its continued survival. How can you deal with this devastating situation? There are two ways you can react. You can do nothing and hope that the markets will recover and restore your fortunes. Or you can get angry and resolve to find out what you can do to reverse the state of your finances yourself. When you get angry and you look into the matter further you'll likely find out that your slick financial advisor is no more than just a peddler who has sold you the product that pays him the highest commission. And that he is no more qualified to give financial advice than your uncle Joe. You'll realize that fund managers put their own interests first, not yours. And when you look into the regulations that are supposed to protect you you'll find that they do no such thing: there are no comebacks for the loss of your money and your compliance with the system has not protected you at all. What you'll actually discover is that you're on your own. The structures and protections that you thought you had are so riddled with get-out clauses as to be worthless. The money that you have so assiduously saved has been mishandled by inept and greedy boneheads supported by a system that is powerless to protect you. The inescapable conclusion is that you must take control of your own capital. You need to take responsibility for investing your own money yourself. Which means becoming informed about some of the alternative investment vehicles available to private investors. There are some powerful new ways to invest your capital which have been known only to a few savvy investors. Perhaps the time has now come for you to join them.
Article Source: http://www.onlinearticlessite.com
Gill Greentree is a writer, blogger and investor. She has contributed to ETF Trend Trading and ETF Trading Course.
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