DIY Investors

The availability of online financial tools has enabled people to manage their money in ways they could not before.
The hidden background: main and wall are never going to love each other, meaning Main Street and Wall Street, synonymous for real economy and financial markets?


Pointedly speaking, DIY investors manage their own personal investments, trade online and build their own investment strategies. Even more pointedly, not so few propagate: it is about low-cost tools and no management fees.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the financial advisors and investment managers doing everything for the investor. It is argued that this may involve expensive products and expensive investment vehicles, like management fees that consume a major proportion of the possible returns.

There are tips around for investors willing to accept risks for higher returns, like try to avoid the herd (IMO it is not so easy to see the herd, if you are in the middle of it ... even, if it already became an avalanche).

However, investors need to decide whether they want to be, say, an accumulator (adding to an investment pool) or decumulator (drawing from an investment pool) and construct and manage the adequate portfolios.

But why so black an white: go it alone vs blindly rely on advisors?
It is the investor's job to understand their personal goals. The advisor's job is to understand good financial practices.

Intelligent advisors find the intelligent combination.
Credit Suisse Private Banking Advisory Services are doing exactly this: a step-by-step approach to a personalized solution. They found a nice word for the combination: instividualisation - institutional type access to individuals.

Rolf Grob, CS Private Banking Advisory Innovation has transformed those objectives into insightful tools for finding the right investment strategies - on smart devices, like iPods. We are proud that he selected the UnRisk solution team to implement the advanced mathematical schemes required to doing the simulations and analytics on such smart devices. His team created amazing applications atop it, helping to explain complex financial concepts to non experts.

I am really most happy that he will present their innovations at our 11 Years of UnRisk event.