Survey: Wealthy Believe in Themselves over Advisors

When it comes to making investment decisions, the wealthy “seem very self confident and will turn to their peers before turning to advisors,” according to the Knight Frank/Citi Private Bank’s global Wealth Report 2010.

The majority of high-net-worth individuals that responded ranked their own expertise as their most important source of information, with their colleagues in second place. Personal bank or wealth manager and independent financial advisor tied for third place.

The report, which was released this week, said that an exception is South Americans, who look first to their personal bank or wealth manager. Most respondents felt that information on the web wasn’t reliable and was the least important source of advice.

According to the survey, the high net worth individual had most of their assets in property, hedge funds and equities. Bonds were the least popular investment. Gold, derivatives and cash also scored low. Respondents expected the best performance this year to come from equities (31%), followed by hedge funds (25%) and property (21%).

Despite a seemingly aggressive investment stance, 72% of high-net-worth individual respondents didn’t expect their personal wealth to grow more than slightly this year.

The report also revealed that the countries which lost the most millionaires (or people with investable assets of at least $1 million) last year were India and Portugal, both down 24%, to 85,000 and 13,000 respectively. Losing the fewest millionaires were Chile and Columbia with 20,000 millionaires and the United Arab Emirates, with 20,000 millionaires, all down only 2%. By comparison, the United States, with by far the world’s most millionaires at 2.5 million, was down 19%.

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