GHASTLY GURUS / THE ECONOMIST

Personal finance

Ghastly gurus

The best advice is to keep your wallet closed

Jan 12th 2013

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Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry. By Helaine Olen. Portfolio; 292 pages; $27.95 and £17.99.
Market Sense and Nonsense: How the Markets Really Work (and How They Don’t). By Jack Schwager. Wiley; 343 pages; $40 and £26.99.

 

 

 

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 exposé 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.