Over 50s increasingly managing their own investment portfolios, survey suggests

News - Banking

Written by Ray Clancy

Wednesday, 27 October 2010 08:24

Frustrated investors aged 50 and over are firing their financial advisors and taking on their portfolios themselves, according to a survey.

They are taking this extreme step as a result of too many years of near zero returns and a growing confidence that they can do better, the poll from fintrader.net which is in its sixth year has found.

Unveiling the findings, financial trading coach and author Vince Stanzione of fintrader said there has been a massive surge in new students from the 50 plus age group over the last 12 months.

‘The biggest trend I’ve seen this year is a move by the over 50s away from advisors and their high fees towards self-managed investments, with an appetite for higher risk strategies. The number of 50 plus investors who are shouldering their own risks is notably on the rise,’ he said.

Fintrader previous survey found that in financial spread betting the over 50s are by far the most successful, profitable traders and investors. The 50 plus group performed 25% better than the 30 to 50 age group and 40% better than the 18 to 30 age group.

The 50 plus success was partly because older investors took more calculated risks for higher returns than the 30 to 50 age group, often favouring commodities and commodity companies, notably in gold, crude oil and silver.

‘The 2010 results reinforce what we discovered in 2009 but the change over the last year is the increasing number of over 50s coming into the self-managed market as they realise they can do better using products such as Exchange Traded Funds for a fraction of the traditional investment product annual fee,’ said Stanzione.

‘As interest rates have continued through 2010 at such a low level, savings look ever more unattractive, especially as the cost of living is still rising. Older investors are starting to see that they will outlive their savings, without the returns they were promised, and are also old enough to remember from the 1970s what inflation can do to savings,’ he explained.

‘Meanwhile, there are barely any returns on traditional buy and hold share investing. Anyone who bought the FTSE100 10 years ago is down more than 11% on a wasted decade. But if they’d gone for gold, they’d now be up 300%, and I’m teaching investors how to profit from both bull and bear markets across the globe and not just focus on the FTSE100 or S&P500,’ he added