My Career Story:

(Part 1/3):

My path and observations while bearing witness a “retail investor revolution,” brought on by accessibility & affordability of financial products, and my value proposition as an investment advisor representative.

I started my career in the financial services industry in 2009. Things were different then. The industry was still somewhat transactional, and initially there was not a ton of emphasis on planning, but that was changing rapidly and for the better. The phrase “goals-based investing” was starting to take hold, and the “retail” investor was catching on quickly. Over my career, I have witnessed a major shift from an industry that was once mainly transactional, to one that is very planning-centric and service-first oriented, with an emphasis on investor-education.

I am proud to be a part of that movement today, while realizing there’s still work to be done.

Since 2009, perhaps the biggest changes in the industry are the improvements around accessibility and costs of the financial products themselves, both having progressed dramatically over that time. Investment products have gotten cheaper and cheaper – a terrific result of technology and consolidation. Today, for an investor to own the largest publicly traded companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) in one single “wrapper” (such as an exchange traded fund (ETF) or index fund) for a mere 4 cents on the dollar was not fathomable 15 years ago! Couple that with accessibility – the fact that we can install an app on our phone and buy shares of the S&P 500 in under 10 minutes, without a brokerage fee and – Yahtzee! – you have the great beginnings of an industrial revolution.

Yes, it has been a fantastic transformation to bear witness -- but it wasn’t without a few hard learning curves along the way – as an industry, but also for me personally and professionally.

Of course, this revolution for the retail investor was also paired with a bull market -- a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Investment returns in most major stock and bond market index funds did phenomenally well since the Great Recession of 2008-09 -- alongside (but also because of) rapidly improving investment product accessibility & affordability. Up until these past 12 months, it had been close to thirteen years in which investors have had to think about the following golden-age, investment disclosure:

Past performance is not indicative of future returns, and investments may contain risks involved – including loss of principal.

Investment behavior had also started to shift. At the beginning of my career, there was a preference for risk mitigation. Investors were still shell-shocked by the financial and economic collapse of the Great Recession (and rightfully so). But by the end of 2021 and by my observation -- a sizeable portion of investor sentiment had shifted back towards a pattern of performance-chasing. Diversification was either assumed or ignored, and except for a few flashes of technical corrections (and one major health crisis) investors did not have to consider true volatility, nor risk. Bubbles were able to form – most notably digital assets/ crypto currencies, and growth/ tech stock valuations – circa the dot com bubble of 2001-2002.

Fast forward to today, and the investment equation seems a bit more complex.

This will be a three-part series - please check back for how my career path and observations continued, and how that helped me to formulate my own value proposition to the investors that I interact and work with daily.