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Americans are bracing for inflation and a market crash: survey:
Inflation and a potential stock market crash. These are the two biggest threats to the US economy and to the financial wellbeing of Americans, so says a survey by personal finance software firm Quicken.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based Quicken/SurveyMonkey online poll was taken earlier this month, which consisted of a sample of 1,200 US adults ages 18 to 74 from the Cint Consumer Network, according to Quicken's press release.
The survey revealed that nearly three-fourths who responded to the survey (71%) ranked inflation (currently at 7% and the highest since the early 1980s), as the top concern, followed by new COVID-19 variants, supply chain disruptions and a stock market crash. On that last point, the survey noted that 52% surveyed agree that there will be a stock market crash in the next five years. Of that group, 58% expect a looming stock market crash will impact their finances negatively, according to the press release.
Yet not everyone views a potential crash as such a bad prospect. Some Americans saw the financial gains that more aggressive investors had made from the day of the 2008 stock market crash, and are now looking to capitalize for the next one. According to the press release, 52% of self-described "aggressive" investors are likely to say the 2008 crash benefited them financially, compared to 18% of so-called "conservative" investors. What's more, 71% of aggressive investors, compared to 20% of conservative investors, believe a stock market crash in the future would benefit them financially. A notable percentage of respondents who believe there's going to be a crash in the next five years – 35% – agree that they're waiting for a crash in order to invest some extra cash.
A sizable percentage of younger adult generations surveyed – Millennial and Gen Z – also see the benefits to a future stock market crash. According to the survey, 41% of Gen Z and 36% of Millennials agree that they are waiting for a stock crash in order to invest their extra cash. Another 30% of Gen Z and 28% of Millennials say they're waiting for a crash so that they can start investing, according to the press release.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 24 2022, @04:09PM (2 children)
They do an alright job, except... when they don't. My take on this is that such a board is more designed to make the customer feel comfortable about putting their money in, rather than protecting that money once it goes into the fund. This falls in a large category of finance regulation that I consider to be window dressing like laws against insider trading and reserve requirements. There's always workarounds for the greedy scammer or the fund cutting a few corners.
For example, do those boards do a good job of policing your later mentioned "prioritizing tax efficiency over total return"? While googling around, I ran across this interesting footnote in a 1999 paper [sec.gov]:
It's a bit over two decades old (and aside from the NYT story, offline), but those stories don't seem to share your optimism.
Except, of course, when the fund is not so set up. Same goes for your next paragraph about incentives. Bad behavior may be scarcer than I thought, but the incentives for it don't go away.
If you're making decisions on what "almost always" or "generally" happens, you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Monday January 24 2022, @05:14PM (1 child)
The actual paper has this quote:
The SEC was revisiting the issue in 1999 due to the press concerns and due to situations where independent directors the fund manager didn't like were able to be replaced by ones nominated by the fund manager, which raised a red flag. Indeed, the SEC was right to look into that, because it's their job. It's not, however, on the same order of as things like the directors being paid off by the manager or anything like that. After all, it's quite possible those individual independent directors were simply not doing a good job. But it's good to know that the regulator is on top of anything with the appearance of possible impropriety.
One thing I think we can agree on is that if an individual mutual fund doesn't have a majority of independent directors, that's a red flag.
No, you're not. Focusing on weird, bizarre, unlikely situations is generally a waste of focus.
Just look at the expense ratio. The expense ratio will cover all operating expenses, including frequent trades made for the corrupt purpose of benefiting the fund manager in some bizarre scenario. More importantly, look at the past performance of the fund, over the course of decades, including volatility.
I said "generally" because I don't feel comfortable saying that no mutual fund manager somehow, for some reason, gets compensated for placing trades and abuses that fact to increase its compensation, because I don't know that for a fact and don't say things I'm not sure are true. I am, however, comfortable in stating that this is not some common pattern of corruption that people should be worrying about. I'm curious: is there even a single mutual fund you're thinking of that had some weird setup where this actually happened, or is this entirely all in your head?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 25 2022, @04:21AM
To cut to the chase here, it was the SEC's job to downplay these issues. Still is. That's why I looked for critics rather than the SEC. I remain wary of your advice because you've emphasized official finance industry structures (like supervising boards and the SEC) for granting security rather than security based more on individual investor awareness.
I grant that my scenarios may have qualified as "weird, bizarre, unlikely", but I remain amazed at the variety of tricks, legal and not, that have been used over the years to acquire more profit for mutual funds, stock brokers, bankers, etc.
Aside from reading advice over the years to look out for such tricks, I have not. Keep in mind, my advice was to stay with the fund unless there were obvious signs of problems, and I used the cases I mentioned as examples. My take remains that window dressing like independent governance boards can be helpful, but they can also lull you into a false sense of security.
Nobody represents your interests better than you do. That's what I want people to take away from my posts here. Those funds, supervising boards, SEC, etc can help, but it's not fully in their interests to do so and there is always potential for things to go very wrong as a result.