A Bernie Madoff type ponzi scheme reared its head in Canada this weekend with the discovery of $50 million in potential investor losses care of alleged financial advisor, Earl Jones. What was of extreme interest was that he was not registered as an investment advisor at all.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last as there are other so called advisors working hard to manage your money.
How can regulators regulate an advisor if he or she isn’t an advisor? How can investors place trust in an advisor that does not have the credentials to be one?
The Investment Industry Association of Canada (IIAC) has done a good job of providing some information on what an individual should look for when shopping for a financial advisor. Their website www.iiac.ca is a good place to start but I have gone one step further in providing a page on our website with three of their publications.
As we can see from the Madoff and Jones incidents, performance should not be the sole measure of success as their performance could not be measured since investors received their monthly cheques for years without incident until funds stopped coming in to pay existing clients.
To read the IIAC publications on choosing a registered investment advisor, you can click HERE
Your thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.
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