Affluent European investors are confident they can construct their own portfolios, reveals research by Cerulli Associates.
In Germany, Switzerland and the U.K, at least 60% of survey respondents say they are either “fairly” or “very” confident in their ability to adopt a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to investing.
The one holdout is Spain, where only 26% of respondents have faith in their DIY investing ability.
Survey respondents had at least €200,000 to invest, reflecting a demographic that tends to be more financially literate than the average person, which probably helps boost confidence.
But having confidence doesn’t necessarily translate to forgoing advisors.
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“In practice, investors might not have the time to build and monitor a portfolio, and they do not necessarily believe that they could do so better than their advisors. Nevertheless, they feel that they could get by with a minimum level of guidance,” says Barbara Wall, managing director at Cerulli, in a release.
Hand-in-hand with DIY confidence is the presence of robo-advice. The U.K. has the largest and most developed robo-advice market in Europe, with 42% of U.K. respondents saying they’d consider using it.
And robo-advice isn’t the domain of the young. In its first six months, the ages of the 1,500 investors who used Italian retail bank CheBanca’s robo-advisor, Yellow Advice, ranged from 35 to more than 55.
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In Switzerland, more than a third of respondents say they have no knowledge of robo-advisors, despite reporting DIY confidence — a positive sign, perhaps, that investors rely on financial literacy to create successful portfolios regardless of available tools.
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