Thanks for writing this; I think my org is doing all of these things—but I will raise this with our finance team just to make sure.
I found this interesting:
Meta note: There is serious adverse selection in financial or investment advice you encounter on the Forum. To simplify, paid investment professionals usually face insurmountable legal and employer obstacles that prevent them from commenting, so what you read tends to be by unpaid amateurs. I can post this because I am no longer a professional investor, and I am providing unpaid general advice.
This might be a little awkward, but to what degree is this an observation instead of an inference—have you generally seen well-received advice on the forum be pretty bad in a way that would be obvious to most financial advisors as opposed to just expecting this pattern based on the legal obstacles? I guess you won’t want to do this, but if you could provide examples of financial advice that you think is incorrect but was well received, that would be pretty interesting to me (and I expect others). You can also message me directly if that’s less awkward.
1) I recently compiled an (admittedly imperfect) list of the 10 senior investors most qualified to give EA investing advice. To avoid calling anyone out, [0 to 1] of the top 10 investing posts are authored by one of these senior folks, and scrolling quickly through top comments, [0 to 2] comments on these posts are by these senior folks.
2) I recently tried to gather 8 of the 10 to discuss investing strategy. 6 of us were able to meet, and our #2 and #3 deliverables coming out of that were “write a forum post on why not to get financial advice from the forum” and “create a basic advice doc”. This is #1, and when combined with the Charity Entrepreneurship book excerpt, hopefully is #2.
Some of what’s on the forum is thoughtful and interesting. But financial professionals structurally cannot refute what isn’t accurate. The most common failure mode is building castles in the sky – theorizing without a basis in reality / without chatting with any actual investors.
Thanks for writing this; I think my org is doing all of these things—but I will raise this with our finance team just to make sure.
I found this interesting:
This might be a little awkward, but to what degree is this an observation instead of an inference—have you generally seen well-received advice on the forum be pretty bad in a way that would be obvious to most financial advisors as opposed to just expecting this pattern based on the legal obstacles? I guess you won’t want to do this, but if you could provide examples of financial advice that you think is incorrect but was well received, that would be pretty interesting to me (and I expect others). You can also message me directly if that’s less awkward.
This is an observation, not an inference.
1) I recently compiled an (admittedly imperfect) list of the 10 senior investors most qualified to give EA investing advice. To avoid calling anyone out, [0 to 1] of the top 10 investing posts are authored by one of these senior folks, and scrolling quickly through top comments, [0 to 2] comments on these posts are by these senior folks.
2) I recently tried to gather 8 of the 10 to discuss investing strategy. 6 of us were able to meet, and our #2 and #3 deliverables coming out of that were “write a forum post on why not to get financial advice from the forum” and “create a basic advice doc”. This is #1, and when combined with the Charity Entrepreneurship book excerpt, hopefully is #2.
Some of what’s on the forum is thoughtful and interesting. But financial professionals structurally cannot refute what isn’t accurate. The most common failure mode is building castles in the sky – theorizing without a basis in reality / without chatting with any actual investors.
Hi JueYan,
I think it would be helpful if you could give examples of wrong advice.