Mr. Johnstone, Sir,
I am in fact questioning the alleged competence of the majority of people whose job it is is to offer financial advice and charge for it
In my near sixty years of involvement in financial markets it is patent that the best method is to do your own research and then when getting utterly stuck be prepared to pay through the nose for the best advice that is available.
People who have money, and are not just plain incompetent, should take full responsibility for their finances to themselves by getting involved and not relying solely upon 'professional' advisers who have 'all of the power and none of the responsibility'.
Of course I am not saying that people should just trawl the web and so on, oh please Sir!
Are you so threatened that you now have to become silly?
When dealing with matters financial, all information is welcome, no matter the source, this also includes the views of so named experts who are in the main middle of the road employees, the most skilled having left to make money on their own accounts.
I quite agree that professionals have some uses, however to consider them to be any more competent than anyone else is not necessarily borne out by recent experience as is clearly evidenced by the dire state of our economy.
Please understand well, whilst you are now talking about out and out fraud, I was not, except in the case of the Sarth London car dealer.
If one of your cherished professionals gives incompetent advice then all can be lost and the victim has effectively had all his money ripped from him, there is nothing left.
If the car dealer sells you a dressed up dud then the outcome is the same, except that the victim is left with a heap of scrap metal that today has value.
So in short:
Do your own research.
Be sceptical and investigate everything that soi-disant 'professionals' want you to do or buy into.
Always your own decisions, at least then if it goes wrong it is your own fault and then stand tough!
I fear for people like our Mr Jefferies, from what he writes he hasn't got much of a chance. If he trusts his financial affairs to someone else he will be like the old Lloyd's members who just paid over their money to agents in trusting that the income would pay the school fees and ended up losing their houses and sometimes their lives. However Mr Jefferies states that he wishes to go his own way, yet he lacks knowledge, he may well end up as a sitting duck, I hope not.
Finally.
In fact I think that know you.
I totally and utterly understand where you are coming from and I agree with some of that which you have written.
Despite this I feel you have not as yet demonstrated sufficient vision to enable your arguments to really stand up and win through in today's slightly topsy-turvy world of finance.
Good luck to you though.