 Good day, fellow investors. You already know Perry Enster, Professor Perry Enster, who is now retired, lives in beautiful Malaysia with great weather and watches our channel and one of his greatest concerns is about the retail investor. So he wished to discuss that a little bit and what is that retail investors like we are here on the channel has to be really concerned about and watch and not to get, let's say, in trouble. Over his investing lifetime. So thank you, Perry, for sharing this with us. Well, I did not actually prepare some specific agenda for talking about retail investors. But one of my concerns after quite a long life of watching people oftentimes with hard earnings, et cetera, trying to save up for retirement for their children's education for circumstances where their health may not be good. Or just simply to buy a new car, a new house is my pet pee with sort of the banking system. I just seen too many people that goes down to their own bank, they're called bank advisors, but in many ways I would rather call them salesmen. They would try to sell these fairly unfortunate ignorant people about investing and convince them to put sizable amounts of money into often investment vehicles that really benefits most of all the bank, not the retail investor. So my biggest concern is also the retail investors because of maybe the lack of education have so poor ability to evaluate what is actually right for me and what is worthwhile for me to actually do. And unfortunately, I don't think banks and also a lot of pension funds are not particularly helpful in that respect. In fact, to the contrary, you often see that people get into investment products that really they shouldn't have because it's not the best way. And we're not talking, in some cases, of course, we're talking about a few hundred dollars or euros, but many times we're talking about people putting 30, 50, 100, 200 thousand dollars and more into a scheme based on a very, very poor foundation. A foundation, for instance, they would never buy a new car without having done good research. They would never buy a new house without having studied it properly or talked with different people. But when they sit down with a bank advisor or broker, they're often convinced to say, oh, I think you need to be in some Frank stock or Apple is a good investment. We recommend, you know, to do XYZ and they don't know why, but they put a lot of their hard earned money into the hands of some and sometimes I would say dubious or schemes or at least excessively expensive schemes. And to me, this is something that and one of the reasons why, as you know, I'm very fond of your channel because I think in it makes more investment knowledge. Available to a larger number of people and I think this can only be healthy as an educator. I really wish, for instance, schools, high schools would do a better job of actually teaching students about some of these, in some sense, very simple things, you know, compounding interest, et cetera, et cetera. So that when students could go out in life, they would actually be more knowledgeable about some of these things. And so this is one of the things that I wish was a little different. And I wish that maybe there was better consumer protection around some of these things that, you know, people actually knew what is the difference. And if they invest, go to the bank and invest the money in a fund run by the bank, how much money does the bank actually charge for all of these services? Because, yes, you see some of them, but there are a lot of these expenses or costs that you don't really see. They are not visible. It's not to say that, of course, running a bank and running a fund, it takes some costs, you know, salaries need to be paid. But I think people need to be much more aware of what it is and we need to have more transparency in that matter. And this is one of the reasons why I think both Peter and I, although I don't consider us retail investors, for one reason, for instance, we went ahead and started a fund because we just didn't feel comfortable about the kind of services even with our assets that we could get in most typical banks. Because we always felt that our attempts would be made to steer us into investments that was really not in our best interest. And how can our person, for example, I get a lot of emails from an MD, so they really work hard at their job of making us live longer, saving our lives. And they do, we all know, 12-hour shifts or something like that. And then they have that one free day and they go to get a cup of coffee with their banker for an hour. So how are they supposed to behave? OK, how to know, how to protect themselves from... Well, first of all, I think that is probably going to be the most expensive cup of coffee they are ever going to buy. But there are several options. First of all, I think educating yourself. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't compare it with maybe buying a car. But if you want to buy a new car, you tend to actually do some research. You talk with other people who are bought this particular brand of car. You may be read some articles in motor magazines. You may go to Consumer Report and see comparisons, etc. Other considerations may be, can I have this car serviced in my area? Is there garages around that will do that, etc. What is the resale value, etc. And I think similarly with investments that you do as an MDE or another hardworking person, you need to educate yourself. You need to do a better job. Of course, when you invest your money with other people, it's always a matter of trust. And I guess what I'm highlighting here is that the perceived trust sometimes in these institutions, whether they're brokers, insurance advisors, etc., is tainted. There's a bias here that is likely not in your favor. You need to understand that. I'm not saying that a medical doctor needs to go through and become an economist, suddenly. But in the same way, I don't think the medical doctor would recommend that I start to prescribe medicine. So it's the same way. You can get a hold of independent advisors. Now, you need to pay them. Amazingly enough, people tend to be really hesitant of actually paying $300, $500 for somebody to sit down and review their portfolio or their investments. But they don't mind investing $300,000 or $400,000 with a young bank clerk because he says, we recommend Fang stocks. And so I think also people need to be a little bit more alert and realistic in terms of their own lack of understanding and what they're getting for things that are free. So what you're practically saying also, what any investor before investing in something should do, should ask a variety of persons independent. Okay, what can be the good thing about that investing, but what is the worst case scenario? And then put it in a personal life perspective. But the key is that you know what I think when you go to a bank is not that common that they will say, this is the upside and this is the worst case scenario. Put that into your life perspective would be a good start, for example. Yeah, I think you need to be realistic. This morning I just read about one of these famous actors who had gained $650 million by making a movie and now the guy is bankrupt. I mean, it actually takes real hard work to lose $650 million. I'm sort of thinking to myself, what can I actually do to spend that much money in a relatively short period of time? I think it all starts with education. You've got to educate yourself so you can go and ask some people who are more knowledgeable. But you need to have a certain level of education so you at least can ask the question and you have some sense of what the responses are. I'm not suggesting that people need to be able to calculate free cash flow or calculate net present value, etc. But they need to at least have some sense of what it is that they're looking for themselves and what the recommendations actually might be and the different options that they may have. Can people get that education? Yeah, I'm a big fan of your channel because I think you're doing a very good job of that. Other places I've recommended to members of my family go to Khan Academy. They actually have little videos that actually talk about some of these things. Just starting to read the financial press on a regular basis so we start to get used to the vocabulary, etc. I'm not saying you need to go back to school and get a new degree. But investing is a lifelong process. You have a life to learn about. There are always things you start to discover where you thought maybe if I invest this way I'll be more fortunate. But there are also these other variables that I need to take into consideration. And of course different economic circumstances allow for very different type of strategies. And then when you think about it, on average we spend 200 hours working on their job to get money. But perhaps spend less than half an hour per month thinking about that money. So you don't need to put 200 hours per month but perhaps that 15 minutes increases to one hour, two hours per month as an investment over 50 years that compounds to huge differences. It's very important. I can tell you in my role as an executive educator I've actually come across quite a lot of even CEOs, very high ranking officers in companies. They are great at managing their own company but they are very, very amateurish when it comes to actually thinking about their own money. Another thing that a lot of people don't really consider is oftentimes the tax implications of their investments. It's sort of like sometimes you consider taxes forgiven. Well that's actually not always the case. There are certain ways you can actually set up your portfolio and the way you make investments that actually may create advantages as opposed to maybe having to pay a lot of taxes. I'm not advocating against taxes. If people choose to live in high welfare societies they of course need to pay a lot of taxes. But I think from your own portfolio point of view you still need to consider it because over time, over the years even small percentage in tax differences will actually yield very, very different results in the future and that's of course why it actually pays off to also think about your tax situations when you're thinking about investments. So the options are then relocating? Well I'm not even going that far. I'm just thinking about the different ways of actually doing it. Most countries for instance would like to encourage people to save for old age etc. and that will be very important for the United States and the retirement accounts. Exactly. So there are different ways of doing that. Now of course you should do some of that but you should not do it without also looking at what are the kind of instruments and what are the yields you are likely to expect from different instruments. Sometimes people tend to let the tax issue completely overshadow the way they think about the investments and so spend the time because you have worked hard for your money and don't just hand it over to any sort of, I wouldn't call them charlatans because obviously they're there and they're paying good, they're there for purpose. But sometimes when you go to a broker or you go to a bank or you go to an insurance salesman his incentives are not completely aligned with your interests. So it's always good to be a skeptical listener in these circumstances. Well, thank you Per. I think this is a lot of food for thought for our viewers especially the newer viewers that are looking for how to invest and what to be careful when investing. So it's just the message is give yourself time, learn about it and the difference over 50-60 years will be amazing. Thank you Per and thanks for doing this. Pleasure. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.