Why I will not contribute to a pension (yet). THREAD BANS IN FIRST POST

Crypto is a kind of a funny religion, even by the standards of say BREXIT or MEGA:

• They advocate for a digital currency because it can be controlled by the governments
• They are concerned that governments could actually control the currency at the same time
• They confuse speculating in a currency with investing in the underlying technology
• They believe the currency is easily convertible despite the fact you can't by as much as a box matches the the kiosk with it
• They see it's automation as a benefit, while ignoring the fact it facilities runs on the currency at a rate no one has seen before
• They ignore what economic history has though us over the last couple of centuries in arguing for an unregulated currency as if it was never done before
• And of course you must believe, if you do it makes sense

This might come as a shock to you, but we fully expect that there will be corruption and abuse in politics and government. That is why our constitution adheres to the tradition of the separation of powers and goes one step further than most other western democracies by making parliament subject to the people. And the assumption of corruption runs through the monetary policies of most of the western world as well, it why we require central banks to be independent of the government to try and minimise the possibility of a government being able to manipulate a currency.

Your fears are just not grounded in reality.

They did not lie to you, you did not understand the product you were investing in and that is entirely on you. There are plenty of guaranteed principle products out there and just as many articles explain the pearls of investing in such products - do you not read some of these???

I very much doubt that there are more than a handful of people on here that I would advise to invest in commodities for two reasons their portfolios are below 5 million Euro so would not benefit from taking on such risk and because they don't know remotely enough about how that market works.

Check out askaboutmoey.com, there were several discussions on these products over there, although for some reason I have never seen a discussion on here. And as Bill Clinton would say: it depends on what you mean by guarantee, principle and return... I don't remember all the ins and outs of these products, but I think when you brush back all the legal mumbo jumbo, what is guaranteed is you get back an amount equivalent to what you put in most cases and the product is structured so that principle + return should alway at least equal the amount invested. And that is pretty much what people got back after a five year period! But I'm open to correction on this as it is a very long time ago since I looked at it and even then I was not very concerned about it as I could not sell such a product over here.

That is not the case. As I have already said, the majority of your return over the long haul will depend on portfolio construction and asset allocation. And the research is there to show the portfolios that are strongly skewed towards equities still perform better when they a certain amount allocated to other asset classes. And in a way this should not be surprising since there will always be times when a given asset class will be out of favour.

It does not matter that I was not in the room, every post you have put up here tells me you don't understand this game. And of course it is much easier to claim they lied to you rather than learning the lesson - you did not understand the product, you did not do your research and you did not manage the investment and you paid the price. This is the same approach may of the people who go badly burned back in the last crash come up with - it was banks, it was the government, the bond holders and the IMF, never the fact that they went against every investing principle out there by borrowing to invest, investing in a high risk asset class (property), failed to diversify the risk and so on. And now having not learned the lesson, many will repeat the experience.

You are doing the exact same now with pensions as you did with that "principle guaranteed" stuff and you can expect the same outcome unless you press the pause button and go learn properly about investing and that includes not only instrument selection, but portfolio construction, performance and attribution and risk analysis and so on.

Yah, in my experience that is not going to happen... I only post here in the hope that at least a few of those stumbling in to the topic will be motivated to either put the time into learning about investing themselves or will decide to consult a professional instead.

I would hope that when it does come it will be very strictly regulated and people will not be allowed to play around with the investment strategy. Saving for retirement is a shared social responsibility, if we don't ensure people save enough for retirement, they will want a slice of our savings when the time comes. And as the population ages there may well be enough voters in that situation for it go through. For instance in March we (Switzerland) will vote on an initiative to make pensioners a 1"3th month" pension payment. They found the required 100k signatures to kick this off and now it looks like about 61% of the voters support it. So social tax rates are likely to go up next year.