Saturday, October 18, 2008 Y
One week of school had past. :) Chatted with my friends over our holidays and then went over to other food courts for our meals. Had lectures, tutorials and met our new lecturers. Modules for this semester are quite hard. Need to jiayou le... :)
Reading the Straits Times this morning. Wow. With the downturn of the economy, businesses and banks were more or less affected by it. And, we, being the investors,are of course affected. We are all worried about the market value of our investments. How much have we lost in total? Is our investmetns safe in the bank? Those invested in the DBS MiniBonds and the High Notes are at the risk of losing all their capital as the Lehman Brothers have gone bankrupt. The papers featured a couple who invested $100,000 with DBS MiniBonds and it just take a phone call from the bank realtionship manager to tell them that all their hard-earned money are gone. I really felt sorry for them. The couple is already getting on in their years, thier savings are meant for their old age. Sigh. Life is just so uunpredictable. But, on the other hand, there is a great controversy out there about the role of the relationship manager and the investors.
Firstly, the fundamental question to ask the investors is " Do you understand fully what you are investing on inclusive of the risk involved?". For the white-collared workers, they may understand them to a certain extent but not to a stage where they are confident in their investments. Needless to say, for the blue-collared workers and the retirees (mostly the elderly), thier knowledge over their investment products is almost minimal. Thus, based on the situations, this is where the realtionship manager comes into the picture to give their opinions and reccommend various investment products to the investors. It is normally based on trustworthyness and the establishment of the banks that the investors choose to believe the realtionship manager to take up the investments that they reccommend.
Secondly, "Is the realionship manager really doing what they are supposed to do?" Or are they trying to sell hard-selling investments products to those low education or retirees in order to meet the sales target and get ready for their promotion. This is really a question of integrity. The banks are trying to investigate on a case by case basis if there is really the presence of mis-selling. I wonder how they can do so. If there is really a party who's at fault, I doubt he will own up and face the seious consequences.
A reminder for myself and the readers, we shouldn't place all our monies in one bank. When it comes to investments, we should be extra careful in it. We have to ensure that we fully understand it and not be too trusting.
Well. The economy is really bad. According to the analysts, recession is setting in soon. Hmm. We should see how things go as time goes by and let nature takes its course.