Blame Canada? No, Blame the Money Managers
Here is an interesting little aside by the economist about the culpability of money managers in the tech bubble bust.

money quote:

As our survey in this issue argues, however, fund managers were far from blameless. Indeed, they were right at the heart of the bubble. Throughout the 1990s, they were urging investors to pile into equities, often of the riskiest variety. They reaped enormous profits from their clients' gullibility, since their pay depended largely on the market value of the assets they had under management. Their fees and charges were typically buried in the small print. And they were just as guilty as Wall Street banks of misleading investors: tales of heroic past performance and of safe double-digit returns reinforced the foolish notion that markets would rise forever.

The truth is that, for the most part, fund managers have offered extremely poor value for money.

And then the "ah-ha!" moment of the article..the common sense, of course moment where we realize that money managers are a scam:

....you will almost never find a fund manager who can repeatedly beat the market. It is better to invest in an indexed fund that promises a market return but with significantly lower fees.

....index funds have super low fees that won't eat into your assets. But speaking of wasted money and scams: here is look at the Royal Global Technology Sector Fund. This is exactly what the article talks about...this fund is:

1) extremely high fees
2) extremely volatile
3) was started after the downfall of the market
4) performed poorly the whole bear market

The fees are well over 3% of the assets, which is good for the money managers, because if the pay was based on performance, they'd never get anywhere with this fund.

the funny part is, Royal stopped calling this fund the "Royal E-commerce fund" so that they could hide ther performance of the underperforming fund (it was dropping by 40-50% a year) by saying 'we don't publish the stats of funds under a year old.

what garbage.

the truth is seen just by the price of the fund shares: $1.94. That's funny, because when they started this fund after the market had begun to tank (when it was still the Royal E-commerce fund), it traded at $10. that was 3 years ago. you do the math. even if it goes up 50% a year for 4 years, it won't catch up to that starting point. kiss your money goodbye. its gone. say goodbye.

The canadian financial institution establishment is a joke and a rip off.