The Great Debate

-James Daly is TD Waterhouse Investor Centre Representative regarding investor confidence.  The opinions expressed are his own.-

Will the new decade herald the emergence of a new breed of self-reliant individual investors?

Some seem to think so according to TD Waterhouse’s annual Investor Confidence Survey of over 1,000 individual investors across the UK, with over half (53 percent) of respondents stating that they now rely more on their own decisions when making investment choices compared to just under a fifth (19 percent) who said they look more to professional advisers and brokers than they did last year.

This disparity reflects an increasing trend of self-reliance, which may suggest that retail investors have become a more sophisticated bunch as they adapt to today’s unpredictable financial markets.

The research goes on to show that 64 percent of respondents state the internet as their most popular source of information followed by the financial press (58 percent).  Overall, the number of UK investors looking to professionals for advice on their trading activities has fallen slightly to a third (33 percent) while those seeking "do-it-yourself" tools from execution-only brokers has risen from 5 percent in 2008 to 20 percent in 2009.

– James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

What is more remarkable, that the premier of America’s largest creditor publicly raised concerns about U.S. creditworthiness or that the market took the news so easily in its stride?

“We have lent a massive amount of capital to the United States, and of course we are concerned about the security of our assets,” Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said on Friday at a news conference to close the annual session of parliament.