March 25, 2004
My experience with unit trusts and mutual funds are that the expected profits are much less than anticipated. The cost of paying exorbitant salaries to gurus and profits to the companies along with the necessary costs of meeting legal requirements, disclosure rules, purchase and sale of inventory, office expenses, legal fees, advertising, sales, and public relations makes the cost of operation prohibitive for anyone to purchase these products.
Rather than more requirements to enhance document creation and retrieval plus legal fees to meet the standard of the law, it would be more useful to require all of those products to carry a warning that they may be disasterous to your financial health. More than half these products cannot do what the market does on its own. Putting a small amount in unrelated stocks and CDs and other financial instruments would be more sound from a risk standpoint. The number can be perhaps ten different items. Knowledge is available on the web and through the American Association of Individual Investors as well as sundry publications and magazines.
We need no further rules to add to the cost. We need education that these products can do to you financially what drugs can do to your physical life.