Honestly, have you ever looked at a piece of technical analysis that a broker has emailed to you?

Emails starting with ‘Technical Levels for 16/03/2018’.

Why do you send these things, but then promote in education that you should follow your own strategy and do your own research?

Oh, and why do brokers expect clients to follow their analysis when they’re probably trading against them?

It’s bizarre, but probably due to a little thing called SEO, something which I’m learning about in this blog.

In my view, market analysts are little more than content marketers.

And that’s absolutely OK.

Even at banks, analysts producing reports are just one cog in the commissions machine – investors want to feel secure in the notion that the people handling their cash know what they’re doing (although, if they just bought $SPY and held for 10 years, they’d probably earn more).

I guess that if a retail client from a brokerage receives something that looks good, there’s a subconscious feeling of security, even though total autonomy with execution is with them…

The broker is just there to collect fees.

At the end of the day, most revenue is derived from fees (example is from advising on M&A but you get the picture).

That ‘2 and 20’ structure, where a hedge fund takes 2% of AUM and 20% of any profit earned has worked well for many years.

The 2% has been explained to me as a manager’s bread and butter, while the 20% is just a bonus – I mean, it’s probably why Bill Ackerman isn’t crying his eyes out after losing out on Valeant and Herbalife.

Some investors have been questioning this model for a while now…

And Mr. Buffet’s famous bet would add fuel to their argument…

Back to the brokers…

It’s not a criticism of why they do it, but I just wonder whether it’s actually worth it in the end when they’re likely to collect the fee or profit off the B Book anyway, since the stats even out to 80:20 loss:win with any types of marketing strategies anyway.