Thats the type of crap that scares me the most. Everything today moves to fing fast. THe second the word "bomb" pops up these computers sell and panic when its actually nothing. All that event proved is just how volatile the market really is. If a nothing event can cause that kind of reaction in seconds....how bad would it be if it really happened.
...
And it just sounds damn shady. They're making money off of what amounts to electrical noise on a signalling wire - or in some cases, it looks like they can even
drive the noise, and then make money off of it.
I put it in another 401k thread - these companies are willing to spend quite a few millions of dollars a year for access to fiber links that will shave milliseconds off of their ping times between their systems and Wall Street's. Millions of dollars to save a few thousandths of a second. Yes, there is some
huge money to be made in this shady trading method.
I might as well give it a shot and tell HR manager about this program, and hope she takes the time to watch it. There was virtually no concern about the impact of fees, or the cost of our financial planner/401k rep/insurance salesman (all three are the same person).
YES, this was a very good and sobering program. And NO, people are not "stupid" about money/retirement. Not when the system is rigged to confuse, mislead, and downright cheat.
The 401k itself was a massive scam to put the employee in the boat of taking all the risk.
Do you really believe the 401k was developed for YOUR benefit???
Just look at the scare that happened earlier this week from a fake tweet, causing the market to dive bomb.
That was your retirement security dive bombing folks...
And look at it from the fund industry's perspective: There was suddenly the possibility of managed pensions going away, effectively herding
millions of people toward their industry, and these were mostly people who had little or no knowledge of investing outside of what they saw in advertisements from mutual fund companies, and who were fearful about their financial futures.
These people don't know what they need to buy, they don't know how to evaluate the product's quality, they don't know how to evaluate the product's performance, and they don't know how to determine how much it costs.
My god, the fund companies must have been holding parties and raves unlike anything anyone had ever seen before on this planet.
In this PBS documentary, even the so called experts were confused, and pretty much repeated their talking points in mush mouth statements.
In every case proposed to the experts, the bottom line reply was "it depends".
Depends? On what? The color of the sky? How deep is the ocean?
Toward the end of the show, with Michael Falcon (paraphrased):
"Should I, or should I not, use a financial advisor who is
legally required to act in my best interests?"
Apparently, that is a very difficult and personal question.
And since retirement investing totally relies on wall street and stock market, is anyone that shocked that all these people are in it for their own profit, and NEVER yours???
Are you really surprised?
I love how they sit you down, and go over your future retirement needs so you can make the right decisions. Only problem with that is, in every scenario the one thing that can never factor in is a crash like we had in 1929 and 2008.
They can never figure in the hard cold probabilty of another GW Bush elected president and spending your assessets like a drunken sailor on some pin headed social or war hawkish agenda.
And how they'll invariably steer you toward the funds that are most profitable for them. If you're in a business, you probably have done your homework to find out which products are most profitable. Not which ones are
best for the customer, but which ones are best for
you and the business.
What does the customer need?
Whatever's in-stock or most-profitable.
...
Though even with those crashes, if you hang onto an investment long enough, they end up looking like blips, followed by recoveries. Hopefully
that past performance
does continue. Maybe it won't though. Damned uncertainty.
That, kiddies, could never be figured into your personal retirement planning future.
And if that doesn't scare the shit out of you... it damn well should.
The chances of us baby boomers actually depending on any retirement plan, other than that beyond social security income, is... Well... I have a retirement plan bridge in Brooklyn up for sale.
Any takers?
In this PBS program, it was stated the government tried to introduce laws to force anyone in the banking system to legally act in your best interest. Legally bound.
The bank lobbies shot down any chance of that law ever seeing the light of day.
Do you really need any more evidence than THAT of your chances for successful financial retirement security ???
"These laws are too restrictive, and will prevent us from acting in your best interests. They'll put us out of business, which will jeopardize
your money! Write your representatives, and tell them to
stop working to destroy
your life savings, and
your financial future!"
You could save and save and invest and invest for 50 years into your plan.
Sleep sound at night. Like a baby.
And all it would take is one more 2008 event to wipe you totally out.
Sure... Things recovered from that event, luckily for us.
But there are no guarantees of that happy ending repeating itself for the future.
Yeah...kind of a lousy set of options. Even the index fund approach, riding the market average, assumes that the US market's past performance (spanning quite a long time) will continue its general upward trend. Or maybe some facet of our pleasant little economic experiment will come apart.
And even then, I'm sure that those who already have
very great wealth will not need to care very much. If the country's economy collapses, there are plenty of very nice tropical regions, where the cost of living is quite low.
Stock market crash just killed 80% of your net worth? 20% of $50M is still a lot of money.
Where are the customers' yachts? The bankers own them, too.