Why all the 'not advice' comments in posts?

There are specific laws regarding people who are licensed to provide financial advice and what they are allowed to do and say regarding financial products - especially in public.

Basically, if you are licensed to give financial advice - you must only give advice within the bounds of what you are licensed to do which includes doing a full assessment of someone's risk profile and circumstances before considering what advice is appropriate. Naturally you can't do that in a public forum.

Those other forums would not be dealing with financial matters anywhere near as much as we do here - it's specifically financial advice which is the issue more than anything else (I'm sure medical advice would fall under the same restrictions though).

What's more, ASIC have previously published guidance (RG162 and CP104) on how they deem financial advice on internet discussion sites to be handled.

Based on their earlier discussion papers - ASIC are generally of the opinion that if you are licensed to give financial advice, you must NOT post in public forums (not ever) lest what you write be misconstrued as advice and acted upon - which is a load of excrement in my opinion.

Even so - care must be taken to ensure that what people write is not taken as advice - and it is my policy that people are not permitted to provide financial advice through this site.

What you are permitted (and encouraged) to do is to provide education - which I think is perfectly reasonable.

Actually, it can be very useful to ask a broader audience for their input on a matter to gain a better understanding of the issue and to ensure that you ask the right questions of your advisers.

I've seen it happen where someone thinks they have a particular problem and so ask their adviser for advice on that matter - which they receive - but it turns out that they were solving the wrong problem and would have been better off had they asked a different question (which they didn't know to ask).

Advisers cannot be omniscient and can't always know what a client is thinking when the client isn't asking the right questions because they don't know what they don't know or they don't know all the possibilities or strategies that could be employed and so never ask about them.

By asking a broader audience, they can learn about other strategies or techniques and discuss them with their advisers to come up with a plan more closely aligned with what they actually want to achieve.

If people approach posting on the site as providing education - and the readers understand it as such - then I think there is far less scope for people to mistake what is written as advice that is necessarily appropriate to them.