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Strategies & Market Trends : Cents and Sensibility - Kimberly and Friends' Consortium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thumbelina who wrote (78314)	2/24/2000 4:41:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108040

Britons 'financially illiterate' You do not have to be trader to play the markets Two-thirds of adults in the UK have trouble with basic financial terms and are ignorant about investment opportunities, a survey suggests. Basic financial terms concepts appear to baffle them, even though four-fifths of those questioned agreed that saving for old age is very important. The ICM survey was sponsored by the Motley Fool personal finance website. Its results show that two-thirds of those polled do not know the FTSE 100, the UK's top stock market of 100 leading shares, even though it has been around for nearly 20 years and is quoted nearly daily in the press, radio, television and the internet. A similar proportion does not know what Individual Savings Accounts (Isa) are and four-fifths could not describe a retirement annuity. Annuity trap The study suggests that more than half a million people in the UK have annuities, but only 17% of them are aware that when they die the investment goes to their insurance company and not their heirs. Many people seem also to have trouble judging which financial products promise the best returns. Even though stock markets are generally accepted as the best long-term investment, 80% people polled believed that gold, property or high interest accounts would do better. Nearly half thought that investment fund managers had a much better track record than they do. A widespread misconception is that stock markets are the ideal place to get rich quick, in the mould of films like Wall Street and Rogue Trader. But Motley Fool's spokesman David Berger warns that 70% of so-called day traders - private investors who jump in and out of stocks trying to make money out of small price movements - actually lose money.