Principal protected notes and other bad investment products

Tom Bradley has an excellent article in the Globe this morning: ” 'It will sell': a tipoff for bad investment products.”
Send it along to your friends and family.
Now that markets have already declined by 50% this bear market, the sales departments of broker-dealers have been feverishly rolling out “guaranteed” hybrid products for the fear-filled masses. Their timing is impeccable as always; the broker-dealer timing that is. Once again, they are making big fees selling the wrong things and at the wrong time in big volume–to the clients who trust them. On top of fat fees and commissions up front, product architects stand to make high probability gains off the top of this client capital over the coming market recovery. Buyers beware. If you are worried about capital preservation but also want a little exposure to the stock market over the next couple of years, you are likely to fare much better putting a large amount of your capital in GIC's and buying a small exposure to a low fee equity index from here, rather than signing up for convoluted products.

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One Response to Principal protected notes and other bad investment products

  1. Anonymous says:

    The only RRSP commercial I remember seeing this year was the Investors Group touting this kind of product. I like how the client was a kind of sloppy goofy business type and the IG agent was a classy clean lady. Says so much of what they think of us. Well, IG we are not all sloppy and stupid. Nice try. If you can't understand its simplicity you just can't understand it. I like the analogy of Vanilla which is my favorite flavour – Vanilla Index: MER .31%

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