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Written by Wilfred Ling
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Wednesday, 31 December 2008 |
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At the beginning of 2008, I wanted to do a few things for that year and this is a review
- I wanted to concentrate more in the retirees’ market because this is a market that is not well served. The cases I saw relating to the retirees’ market were huge in portfolio size but numerically the number of clients was disappointingly too few. I feel that the numerically few retirement cases for 2008 were a great disappointment for me.
- To work with my other colleagues in the firm for joint field work. This was a huge success. It was very enriching for me as I had the opportunity to meet up with my colleagues’ own clientele some of whom are “celebrities” in their own right. I had to ask my colleagues to allow me to meet up with their richest clients (have to be thick skin to ask lah). There were some cases which there were opportunities for me to meet their clients’ needs. Also, had opportunities to visit a couple of Rotary clubs and made some new interesting friends there. Had also participated in seminars via joint field work for the en-blocs and learn the meaning of “friendly” competition from other IFA firms.
- Formalizing working relationship with partners as Introducers. There was no Introducers sign up. I did not do anything in this area. It turn out that my own colleagues are the best “Introducers.”
- Had wanted to spend more time replying to emails relating to financial advice. I found that most people prefer to meet face to face rather than email. So there was no improvement in this area.
Throughout the year, I had a few distracters – some of which were good and some bad: - Surprisingly had more cases of fee-based financial planning somewhere in the middle of the year onwards. To me that is good although I suspect the increase in cases was because of the losses in these clients’ existing investment portfolios. They had wanted a second opinion as to whether their investments’ losses were due to market situation or something else. Towards the end of the year, there were more cases of planning for both insurance and investment.
- I was particularly upset in two investment portfolios which were meant to be relatively conservative. In fact these are not even considered “investment” technically.
- A product provider threatened to take legal action against me because I did not like their product and had highlighted some of the product’s disadvantages in my blog. I disabled the blog entry to make everybody happy.
- My hard disk crashed and my backup storage also failed on me. I was very upset to have misplaced my trust on that backup storage device. This slowed me down for nearly 1 month. This turn out to be a blessing because I am now more organized than before.
One should always count his blessings and hence these are the blessings I had this year: - Greatly enriched in experience due to the opportunity to meet my colleagues’ super high net-worth clientele;
- I had learn a lot studying alternative investments;
- There was a fund that I studied but hesitated to recommend it to the firm because there were better performing funds having the same level of risk as this one. It turned out to be invested 100% in the Madoff’s ponzi scheme! Thank God nobody in the firm sold it. If I had recommended it to my clients and colleagues, I would be hung on the tree already! Strangely, seems nobody sold this fund in Singapore too although it is approved by MAS under the restricted scheme.
In summary, the year 2008 was a good year for me both in experience and financially. For 2009?
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