Cabbages at heart
MARK TWAIN said that a cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education, and an independent financial adviser is to an insur- ance broker what a cauliflower is to a cab- bage. Now these advisers are putting up a rearguard action against regulators who seem unconvinced of their superiority. They are running an advertising campaign. Many of them of them are active in their local Conservative associations, which with- out them would be an endangered species. They particularly resent the requirement that they should able to show £10,000 of capital, at least in the form of a bank guar- antee. An adviser who has not been able to rub that much money together is not some- one whose financial advice I would readily take. This point had eluded a friend of mine who, suspecting that her money was under-employed in a building society, sought independent financial advice about it. She saw the IFAs' advertisements and wrote in to ask for the names of advisers in her part of the world. On being sent a list of four, she checked them out. Two of the four turned out to have gone bust. Perhaps (she thought) they had taken their own advice, or had been advised by the other two. Or perhaps they were cabbages at heart.
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