When Choosing Investments Reviews Can be Helpful or Harmful

When choosing your investments, investor reviews can be helpful or harmful. Some investing reviews are written to provide an honest opinion, while others are intended to manipulate the reader. The challenge for investment seekers is to identify the author’s motivation when they penned the review.

Insight

There are investors within the investment community who have the best intentions when it comes to sharing their insight and experience with others. Most are genuinely trying to help others make better choices. This type of review is not likely to have any hidden agenda. These are by far the most valuable to investment seekers.

Credibility

Fund and money managers have delicate reputations to uphold. Not only must they establish themselves as financial experts they must maintain their relevance and credibility. This is done primarily by sharing their knowledge with others. The people who leave these reviews are primarily motivated by improving their image and expertise within the investment community. This is not to say that there is no value in this information. Quite the contrary. These reviews can hold incredible insight and experience for amateur investors. Just be certain the author’s motivation is improving his/her credibility, not fishing for new clientele.

Clients

Being a financial adviser is a challenging profession, both because markets can be volatile and so can client’s confidence. Although it may seem similar to the motivation of “credibility” above, these people appear to want to help other investors, but really are only motivated by gaining more clients. Or, keeping the customers that they have. To achieve this, some will go so far as to publish fake news about their competitors.

Summary

With so many choices for investors to make when investing, conducting research is an important part of building their investment portfolio. One the most common resources investment seekers choose is investor reviews. These can be extremely helpful if provided with good intentions. If the information being shared is motivated by something other than being helpful, there is little to no value in the review. Therefore investors should first ascertain the author’s intentions and motivation for sharing the information. This should be done before they invest in any opportunities recommended in reviews.