Short Takes: Too Many Advisors and more

Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

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Small Business

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Preet Banerjee interviews John de Goey who says “there are way too many advisors in the business,” and “we could easily get rid of one-third of all advisors in Canada and not make a ripple in terms of access to advice.” I agree with this. Most financial advisors are paid for their sales effort and not for their advice. The only way to lower Canada’s unreasonably high cost of investing is to lower the total amount of money that goes to advisors and fund managers. This necessarily means there will be fewer advisors.

Jason Zweig has 19 questions to ask your financial advisor along with the “correct” answers. While this is an excellent list of questions, few advisors would have the best answers, and those who do would likely only handle wealthy clients.

Canadian Couch Potato explains the upcoming change to stock-trading settlement periods.

Boomer and Echo aren’t fans of “core and explore” investing.

Preet Banerjee explains asset allocation for investing beginners in his latest video.

Big Cajun Man describes a trick for keeping your employer from taking back some or all of a direct deposit. I’d be interested in knowing whether this trick actually works or whether banks would just track down further transactions.