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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

To distill this to a single piece of advice: every mainstream brokerage, private wealth management, or broker asset custodian[1] firm provides a Web interface with at least read-only access to balance and holdings. If you’re using an asset manager who hasn’t provided access (on a well-known domain name), find out why and get access. There’s no need to trust printed or static PDF statements. You should be able to see exact holdings as reported directly to you by a recognized name.

[1]: Many smaller firms use Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, or another large firm as custodian: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=170678, https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/how-pwm-really-works-pa...

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If you're dealing with a scammer who's not afraid to blow $40k a pop on chartered jets, there's nothing stopping them from creating a pretty website that shows fake portfolios composed of real prices of real assets they haven't actually bought.

so how does one protect oneself from these kinds of scams? how do i distinguish it from a legitimate find manager who actually performs as well as they claim?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991784 has more, but basically, get access to Web-based results from name-brand bank or custodian. A legitimate PWM professional will already be using a custodian bank (or will be employed at a large bank like UBS, JPM, or BoA, so you'll have access to their employer's site).

Also, they'll appreciate that you're doing this due diligence. If you get any pushback, move on.

Also worth noting that this problem is mostly moot for a typical retail investor who has assets at a name-brand brokerage like ETrade, Schwab, or TD Ameritrade, and already has self-service access to the bank/brokerage's site. At that point, an individual advisor might be able to make unilateral allocation changes, but the money's there and the bank will have a trading history. This problem in this article basically starts with trusting a lot of money to an individual or tiny firm, and that basically only comes up in PWM and non-traditional asset classes.

I agree that electronic deception is a real risk, though I tried to cover this briefly with "on a well-known domain name." To be more specific, if the site isn't a name-brand PWM, brokerage, or custodian bank domain (examples: ubs.com, vanguard.com, fidelity.com), find out why. I agree that a site is easy to put up, but getting it on a domain name visited by hundreds of thousands or millions of people is not.

(And yes, a few tiny PWM firms do use their own Web sites, and you should be much more skeptical of the data you're getting from a 6-employee firm's site). Get access to your custodial account at a name-brand firm's site, or change asset managers.)

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