Brent Sheather: Fake news part of finance industry's 'expert advice'

There is a war going on between fact and fiction and we all suffer if truth loses the battle. Photo / 123RF

Opinion

• Brent Sheather is an authorised financial adviser and may have an interest in the companies discussed.

Facebook recently copped a bit of flak for reporting fake news particularly during the US election.

Timothy Ash, writing in the Financial Times said: "The essence of the post-fact threat to democracy is that entirely false claims (e.g. the Pope supports Donald Trump for President) wrapped up in emotionally appealing narratives seem to have acquired the power to sway a significant part of the electorate. Warm narrative prevails over cold fact, feeling over reason."

How do we fight back?

Ash suggests that "universities can do more to give rigorous evidence - based analysis a wider circulation" and "there are philanthropic foundations that fund serious investigative journalism".

Any solution should probably also involve banning reality TV, limiting sports news to 30 seconds a night and expanding TV news coverage to include important world events.

Whilst the authors of and the motives for disseminating fake news aren't always clear often the latter has something to do with money.

Not surprisingly the finance world has a long history of false news promulgated mainly by individuals and institutions with something to gain.

Bloomberg cited an instance back in 1814 when a certain Colonel du Bourg committed what became known as the Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814.

The fraud was pretty simple - at the time England was at war with France and England's finances weren't looking so good.

Colonel du Bourg told everybody that Napoleon had been killed and the war was more or less won.

As soon as this became widely believed UK government bond prices surged and the good Colonel began selling £1.1m of government bonds into the rally.

More recently and closer to home, around 1987, the false news industry manifested itself in various tip sheets which were popular at the time.

The game that apparently was played back then was for the perps to talk up a stock, wait for the price to go up by 10 per cent on the following Monday and then sell.

The rules have changed a bit since then, the stock exchange and the registries can trace who is doing what to whom but the false news industry continues in various other guises.

Overseas "stock spruiking" is still popular and difficult to regulate, thanks to the internet.

The business plan, otherwise known as "pump and dump", runs like this: the scammer buys shares in a thinly-traded low-priced stock like a failed technology or bio-tech company, of which there are many, then sends out millions of emails telling people it is about to increase in value 10 fold as its technology is on the verge of some breakthrough.

Various gullible recipients of the emails push the price up which brings in even more buyers at which point the scammers sell out.

Locally the big players in the false news business, as we noted a few months back, include investment experts.

Many financial advisers and fund managers are under pressure from low-cost funds so their version of the false news industry is to talk up manager skill and play down the impact of fees.

This necessarily means ignoring all the facts, not to mention the extensive library of academic work on the subject.

I particularly like the fund managers who wring their hands and profess to worry that we aren't saving enough. Save more they say - give up luxuries like coffee and alcohol they suggest.

What they don't say is that equally, if not more important over time as what you save, is what your savings will earn and the most reliable way of earning more is paying less in fees, all else being equal.

Retail investors may be further confused when they are told that power dressing and a positive attitude is the key to investment success although the fact that the authors of the advice are usually power dressing consultants or positive attitude seminar organisers is an important red flag.

Just recently a very good book on the subject of bad advice from experts was published by US journalist Helaine Olen. Entitled Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, the book, according to the Economist magazine, "demonstrates that much of the advice given by gurus on TV or in print is either fatuous or based on ridiculous assumptions".

Whilst the authors of and the motives for disseminating fake news aren't always clear often the latter has something to do with money.

One of the better local efforts in this post-fact world occurred recently when one "expert" who works for a firm selling high-cost KiwiSaver funds argued that low fees were nice but this could be at the expense of performance.

He failed to mention all the academic research which shows that there is a 1:1 negative correlation between fees and returns.

He then went on to say that passive funds don't do any analysis so if the market is falling passive funds go down with the market.

Let's think about this one for a minute because it is a favourite argument of misinformation providers and fits the description of "warm narrative prevailing over cold facts".

The implication is that passive funds go down with the market but active managers sell out before the decline. Selling out when you think a stock is falling is known as "market timing" and all the research shows it doesn't work. What frequently happens is that the fund manager sells just before the market goes up.

The "expert" then topped off things by saying that active managers should be able to outperform the market. Well actually no, that's not right either according to independent research from the likes of the Standard & Poor's Index Versus Active study (SPIVA).

There are almost an infinite number of variations of the false news theme in the finance sector. The more money there is involved the more attractive it is to opt for "warm narratives and emotion over cold fact and reason".

Take the various fund manager beauty parades for example. The media reports congratulatory speeches emphasising manager skill and high fives all round but the facts are that many winners of these awards actually underperform low-cost passive funds investing in the same area.

The UK regulator has to its credit recently been very critical of fund ratings from the likes of Morningstar saying that the "funds with the best ratings rarely outperform their benchmarks after fees".

One might reasonably expect the local regulator (FMA) or the Commission of Financial Capability (CFC) to come down hard on these false news authors but perversely whilst the FMA's mantra is "promoting fair, efficient and transparent financial markets" it doesn't consider it needs to act when leading participants in the local investment industry make disingenuous statements.

To make matters worse the CFC has, on occasion, been complicit itself with embarrassing comments like "the most important thing is the return after fees".

The obvious problem with this logic is the return after fees is, duh, a function of how much is paid in fees.

There are a few key rules essential to investment success that have stood the test of time - get your asset allocation position right and maximise diversification to name a couple - but maybe in 2017 we should add "beware of experts bearing free advice".

Things haven't got as bad as the "Napoleon is dead" scam but retail investors in particular need to be careful and take everything with a grain of salt, except for this column of course.

Any story with a headline beginning with "the truth about ..." is almost certainly fake news. NZ needs a strong, independent regulatory system and independent and cynical business journalists.

There is a war going on between fact and fiction and we all suffer if truth loses the battle.