Show Me The Data

On Friday I had an interesting phone conversation with Tim Miner of Investment Riches. He was talking to me about his changing business model and shared an interesting statistic. Two years ago, when he was in the beginning stages of his website launch, more than 70% of his surveyed readers felt confident that they understood their local market. In the most recent survey, less than 15% still felt confident.

This is not surprising if you consider that investors tend to become overconfident in their own skills when the market is good and overly insecure when the market is bad. This is similar to the change in investors' perceptions of their understanding of the stock market after the dot-com bubble.

What it means is that there is opportunity for investment providers that can help their clients feel comfortable with a market or investment. Consumer confidence is at a 16 year low because people don’t know what to expect. Uncertainty begets fear.

While you can’t give your clients full certainty in terms of a guarantee without the likelihood of violating investment regulations, you can provide them with the information to help them understand the market, the risks and the changing investment climate.

The good news, for anyone in the industry, is that there isn’t one clear investment that investors feel certainty about right now. That wasn’t the case nine years ago when investors were certain about the stock market. It also wasn’t true three years ago when investors were certain about the real estate market. With inflation continuing to spike the prices of food, transportation and commodities, investors are losing purchasing power by doing nothing. Historically hard assets retain their value much better than fiat currency.

Jerry Maguire may say, “show me the money,” but uncertain markets say, “show me the data.”