Our British Friends across the pond
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After attending an FPA event in Tampa, one of the presenters mentioned that the regulatory entity in the United Kingdom known as the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has a regulation to take effect in 2012 banning commission product sales completely and moving everything to fee/advisory business.
Does anyone have any information on this? Will be interesting to see, considering our common backgrounds if our SEC/FINRA are speaking with their English counterparts to one day implement the same.That would sure put a lot of brokers out of the business. Could be even more lucrative for the survivors. Of course the small investor would be the one hurt in all of this since no one would call on them.
I doubt that will happen - the FSA, let alone Europe, don’t know sh*t about investments. It’s painfully obvious that fee based or fee only is not always in the client’s best interest, ie., paying an annual fee on a SMA bond portfolio versus paying commissions on that same portfolio.
This may sound stupid, but how the hell would any municipality raise any cash in that kind of setup? Don’t you need individual investors that buy individual investments (i.e. stocks, bonds, etc) to continue to purchase them? It seems to me that those places can’t just rely on hedge funds, mutual funds, and pensions to buy those issues…