Baby boomers have now been put under the microscope by investment advisor and ScotiaMcLeod Inc. director David Cork of Ottawa three times.

The Pig and the Python, published in 1996, looked at the impact of changing demographics on personal financial planning. When the Pig Goes to Market, which followed in 1999, focused on helping investors develop the skills to invest in recent markets. The third and most recent book in the trilogy, Bulls, Bears and Pigs, came out this spring. It takes stock of the boomers, whose leading-edge members are now age 58 and approaching their “golden” years.

Like its predecessors, Bulls, Bears and Pigs is not likely to become a classic. Its very subject matter means it will become dated as the boomer demographic bulge moves into another life stage, which could provide Cork with fodder for future books.
For now, however, it will certainly interest boomer investors, particularly those who were burned by the stock market downturn a few years ago. It’s a light book, but well crafted and very readable, and it would make an excellent client-appreciation gift.

The book also offers lessons for advisors on managing client relationships. An advisor in the book, for instance, tells a prospective client: “I don’t want to know what you have in the market. I want to know what you’re doing in the market.” This makes the client clarify his life goals. The weakness of the lessons, however, is that they too often sound like biz-school case studies.

Like many other personal finance authors, Cork uses a fictional story — with characters, settings and a plot of sorts — to bring his concepts to life. In Bulls, Bears and Pigs, he brings back the characters that appeared in his first two books: Hazen Armstrong and Pieter and Meredith DeMarco.

Unhappy investors

Armstrong is a 68-year-old demographer who has spent his career studying the effects of baby boomers on the Canadian economy and advising companies on boomer trends. It is through him that the boomer facts and figures and predictions for the future are laid out.

Hazen’s friends, the DeMarcos, are
mainstream boomers; in this book, they are in their mid-40s and have been heavily involved in the technology market. And they are unhappy with how their stock portfolio has been performing.

This third book introduces two new
characters: Jamie Arsenault, a 30-something financial planner at a large investment firm, and his senior partner, Andrew Proctor. The two advisors set the DeMarcos on the path to good money management.

The premise of the book is that the
generation born between 1947 and 1965 has influenced the sales of everything from toys to real estate in the past and is now having a huge impact on financial markets.
As one character says: “If the boomers get spooked by the markets, it will become everyone’s problem.”

Proctor’s way to prevent this from happening
involves the keystones of financial planning — a life plan and a financial plan: “Write down all the things they want to accomplish and prioritize them … [Then] they have to create a financial plan, a written document that prioritizes funds and cash flows toward the realization of their goals. The key is that both are written and in perfect sync with each other.”

Sound familiar? Yes, but it may be just what
your clients need — to reinforce the ideas you’ve been discussing with them. Proctor also gets into the concept of long-term investing. “People are willing to hold onto a home for many, many years,” he says, “and that almost always results in a positive outcome. But the average holding period for a mutual fund is now less than two years.”

He also touches on the theory of
diversification.

The trouble with trying to combine a storyline with a message is that the character who delivers the message can sound preachy. In Cork’s first two books, Armstrong, the demographer, had the guru role and helped the DeMarcos gain some insights into investing. It worked because Armstrong, the affable wizard and kindly mentor, was a fully fleshed-out character with a life of his own.

Know-it-all characters

In this book, that role is given to Arsenault and Proctor, the financial services professionals who have all the answers and formulas for financial well-being. However, they are one-dimensional, know-it-all characters, which comes off as too self-serving to the financial advisory industry and annoying to a general readership.