Accredited Asset Management Specialist - AAMS

  

The AAMS is yet another semi-useless accreditation in the finance world. (We should probably offer test prep for it here at Shmoop Central.)

In theory, it helps designees find jobs, but like...seriously...what real money management firm would care at all about someone having spent 16 hours of self-study, and then taken an oath to be, um, ethical...after passing a short test with questions like: "Should you sell a little old lady - a) T-Bills; b) Lottery tickets; c) Venture capital offerings; d) The Brooklyn Bridge?

The AAMS sits under the auspices of CFP (Chartered Financial Professionals) and, well, it fills up space on an otherwise very blank business card.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What are Active Investing and A...4 Views

00:00

Finance a la shmoop.. what are active investing and active management? Active

00:09

doing something, active as in trying to beat the market by trading stocks active [People riding a bike on stock market appears on board]

00:15

as in humans making decisions often with the help of computers trying to beat

00:20

their index or the overall market ie the S&P 500 that's what we mean by the

00:24

market active; investing.. active; management okay

00:29

passive just passive.. active is what hedge funds and mutual funds and any

00:35

kind of funds that have a strategy do they actively try to invest money such

00:40

that the performance of their portfolio does better than whatever index or

00:45

benchmark it's measured against and notice were not talking about after-tax [Man discussing active investments]

00:50

performance here because remember every time you trade in a taxable account

00:54

while the attacks men cometh but we won't go there right now..... Your benchmark

01:01

compare is versus the S&P 500 and you manage a broadly based mutual fund the

01:07

passive investing cousin in this investment is an index fund think ticker

01:13

SPY, that's the biggest S&P 500 index fund well index funds are not actively

01:18

managed they are passively managed they just sit there and get tweaked a little [Pile of money grows larger overnight]

01:23

bit each year or really each quarter to kind of mirror the S&P 500 or whatever

01:28

their index is supposed to mirror but they just kind of sit there there's no

01:31

human trying to beat the market they are the market index funds are the

01:35

market and yeah 99% of actively managed funds don't beat the market over any

01:42

extended period of year like five or ten years very few ever beat the market and

01:47

essentially none of them beat the market after taxes so then why would someone

01:51

invest in an actively managed mutual fund when they're paying taxes and

01:56

they're thinking about an index fund as a comparable well basically they're one [Mutual funds on a table and a lollipop appears]

02:00

of these so yeah don't be one of these guys

Up Next

Finance: What are Investment Objective and Style?
3 Views

Investment objectives and styles vary from investor to investor. Some are in it for the long haul. Others, um... don't look at "Ponzi" as a dirty w...

Finance: What is Acting Against Recommendations?
2 Views

What is Acting Against Recommendations? In the financial world, if an investor is acting against recommendations, they are not listening to a recom...

Finance: What is an Agency Relationship?
202 Views

What is an Agency Relationship? An agency relationship allows an agent to act on behalf of the individual or company who hires them. This type of r...

Finance: What is principal?
707 Views

What is principal? A principal is an entity of record in a transaction with authorization for one side of a transaction, whether it be as buyer, se...

Find other enlightening terms in Shmoop Finance Genius Bar(f)