I am a student of prior wars. One of the craziest wars was World War I, sometimes called the Great War. Parts of this war took place in Northern France, Belgium and Southern Germany via trenches. The Germans advanced and dug large trenches over a vast stretch of land and then defended it. The Europeans also dug trenches very close to where the Germans dug their trenches. The Generals on both sides periodically ordered their men over the side of the trenches to advance to the other trenches. If you failed to get out of your trench when ordered, then you were likely to be shot dead right there by your own side. If you got out of your trench, then you were likely to be shot by the enemy. This insanity repeated itself for several years with neither side advancing. All that happened is thousands upon thousands of people were needlessly killed by incompetent military leaders.
Today's political climate reminds me of this trench warfare. Instead of playing out on a battlefield somewhere, it is playing out on Twitter®. This is just pure stupidity in more ways than one. First of all, nobody should believe that their opinion on Twitter matters in the grand scheme of things. Secondarily, if you are espousing your political beliefs on Twitter, then you will most certainly get attacked and perhaps even some will try and cause you to lose your job. This is all totally ridiculous. It really should stop. I have started to see it rear its ugly head in #fintwit. This is disturbing to me, because our industry already has to fight off all these stinking Ponzi schemers. We do not need to be sullying our reputations as a group over mindless political opinions.
Twitter is today's trench warfare. A bunch of people with way too much time on their hands send out tweets and foolishly believe that their words carry a lot of weight. The truth is Democrats do not care about a Republican's opinion and vice-versa. So, I am going to double cancel culture the both of you Democrats and Republicans. Cut it out. You are giving our profession a black eye.
I notice some things about our industry having been a part of it since 1988. For most of my career, other financial advisors have mostly looked at each other as competition. I recently had a financial advisor with an office in my building tell me that we were competitors. I told him that we were not. He disagreed. I tried to reason with him that the people that he knows in his circle are in a different circle than the people in my circle. He was unconvinced. Although, I could have offered a ton of help to this younger advisor, he was totally opposed to the idea of even having a further conversation, much less help from a competitor. I thought how sad. He was trying to branch out on his own, but months later, I noticed that he took a salaried job at Citibank. No surprise.
I met another financial advisor who once told me that he knew how much assets under management that I had. I replied, "You're kidding?" He said, "No. In fact, I have a list of every financial advisor in town and how much they have in AUM on an Excel spreadsheet." I was stunned. Why is this guy wasting his time worrying about what other advisors in town are doing? Seems pretty dumb to me. Must be a male ego thing, I guess.
There are some young people coming up today who are making changes in that attitude. Specifically, Jason Wenk, Tyrone V. Ross, Jr. Dasarte Yarnway, Brittany Castro, Emlen Miles-Mattingly, Douglas Boneparth, Ryan Hughes, Alex Rosenberg, Taylor Shulte, Justin Castelli, Breanna Reish , Alex C. (the Armenian) and Kyle Van Pelt. Forgive me, if I left you out. Those are the names that came to my immediate mind. These folks are all about helping each other. They do online seminars, video blogs and reach out to each other by social media. Others have businesses that help young advisors. These people are doing great things for our industry. I can tell you confidently that the future of the financial profession is in good hands with these young professionals. They get it and frankly, I do not care what their political beliefs are since they have no effect on what they are trying to accomplish and I strongly believe will accomplish.
Let me know if I can be a resource.
https://riarules.com
https://marianfs.com
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