Click here if you are a private investor

You've probably noticed this several times. You arrive on a financial site and it starts asking you if you are an institutional or private investor. It's the kind of thing we try to get past quickly, like those annoying and insistent messages imploring us to accept cookies. But when we think about it a bit, we wonder what the hell they care whether we are private investors or not. It's as if we are considered as separate beings, with fewer resources, fewer skills, and perhaps more naivety too. It reminds us of minors who are supposed to click on the big "I'm under 18" banner on a porn site. Who has ever done that, by the way?

This seemingly innocuous phenomenon actually hides a real problem. We, private investors, small shareholders or even simple savers, are not considered by the financial world as part of the same world. They have the knowledge and the money, in short the power. On our side, on the contrary, we are only a tiny cog in the machine, which, taken in isolation, is seen as weak, immature, stupid, or even useless.

Either they try to avoid you, because your cash is not generating any income, or they are gouging you in all directions, management fees on your accounts, your investment funds and ETFs, custody fees, commissions, taxes, etc. Everything is done so that your little nest egg feeds that of the biggest players in finance. Brokers have an interest in you trading. Bankers and insurers entice you with useless products full of more or less hidden costs. Pension funds steal part of your salary which is used to pay incompetent managers.

The people who "advise" you have no idea about your real needs, your personality and your propensity for risk. They don't give a damn, even if they sometimes make you believe otherwise, by making you fill out alibi questionnaires. How can you blame them? After all, it's not their money. At least not at first.

Most people believe they have no other choice. It is normal to resort to a professional. Finance is, after all, very complex and these people have followed long studies to know all the tricks. The problem is that history has shown us that despite all their experience and their pseudo knowledge, for the most part they have no idea what they are doing. Or worse, on the contrary, they know it very well, to the wrong end.

Financiers are the world champions in making things complicated that are not complicated. Investing, basically, is relatively simple. There is no need for an armada of intermediaries prowling like jackals around your assets. They have a knack for putting you to sleep and/or impressing you with cheap graphs, always with a nice upward green curve in plain sight. All this is not finance. It is marketing.

The more dependent you become on them, the more profits they make. Stop listening to bankers and insurers. They only know how to generate money for themselves. Invest directly and pay yourself quality companies that pay solid dividends.