How Sheryl Garrett got a hush-hush invitation from President Obama and how she pierced the fog about putting clients first

That is awesome!

Congratulations to Sheryl Garrett and the long fought battle of all fiduciary advocates. I was beginning to think, in my life time, that “doing the right thing” in acting in the consumer’s best interest was just an aspiration never to be realized.

Now Wall Street must choose to adapt and compete on the depth and breadth of investment and administrative counsel and the cost and pricing of its services. At this moment it seems like there is a lot of catching up to do for brokers, as presently they are the high cost low value added option to advisors which do not acknowledge or support their brokers render advice.. Harvard’s Clayton Christenson tells us the biggest mistake firms make when facing industry redefining innovation , is to look at innovation in the context of their existing business model when a new business model is in order. There has never been an instance in a free market since Adam Smith introduced the “invisible hand” (1776) that the consumer’s best interest did not prevail.

SCW

Stephen Winks

Accolades and recognition for Sheryl and her team that is long long overdue.

King Obama. Sounds about right.

This White House contact gives Ms. Garrett a special opportunity — and obligation — to raise promotion of the fiduciary standard above pious generalities to include procedures that are actually fiduciary, which requires application of specific fiduciary rules and regs to the outfits that sell investment advisor training-and-certification.

Don Trone is right in his reply to Ron Rhoades’s flowery abstractions when he says: “Real people, such as advisors, trustees and investment committee members, want to know in plain English what they need to do on a step-by-step basis to be able to demonstrate that they have met a fiduciary standard of care.”

Unfortunately, the mathematics of long-term investment probabilities is not Mr. Trone’s cup of tea, and the system he launched at fi360 excels at misleading investors in favor of mis-trained and mis-armed investment advisors and Wall Street. Worse, fans of that system are now attempting to make it accepted as “best practices” for investment fiduciaries. See fiducio.com.

It’s an ominous sign that the fiduciary oath that Ms. Garrett carried to the White House event was, I’ve been told, hatched at the offices of fi360. It certainly features flowery generality, lacking specifics for or even mention of the obligations of the training-and-certification sellers.

But I hope that Ms. Garrett and other leaders in this field will stand up and demand that the fiduciary standard be applied, with specifics reflecting comprehension of the relevant math, to the training-and-certification sellers as well as brokers and advisors. If they don’t, robos will come in and do it for them, with highly adverse effect on the whole community of financial planners and investment advisors, including the best.