Yesterday I was fortunate to attend a dealer group's session on the coming regulation changes. It was aimed at Registered Financial Advisers. This group seek its own licence, but said to members that it would like to know by November 30 if members planned to join their licence or seek their own.

The point here is that November 30 is not that far away.

Although the FSLAB Bill is still waiting for its second reading in Parliament it could progress through these final stages quite quickly.  Advisers probably need to be thinking that the bill won't change too much and they will need to be thinking about the future shape of their business.

I did like the comment that officials wanted to get rid of acronyms like AFA, and RFA, but FAR is just RFA spelt differently.

We have had quite a bit of Responsible Investing this week. The Responsible Investment Association report shows that this is really an area that advisers can't ignore anymore.

The report has some useful information showing growth, trends and investing styles. It's well worth a read. If you would like a copy drop us an email.

The other piece, Getting to Grips with RI, also garnered some comments which are worth a read.

Last week we mentioned Naomi Ballantyne's recent podcast. To find out more about it read this article. I've now had a full listen and it's a good story.

And to wrap the week up here's a little story about creative use of statistics. The FMA, which seems a little obsessed with KiwiSaver fees rather than net returns put out a press release headlined: "KS members say dollar fee information is useful".

Thankfully, Tamsyn Parker at the NZ Herald looked at the data and headlined her story: "Most Kiwis fail to notice changes to KiwiSaver statements". 

And she was correct.

"While 50% did not notice the new fee information, among the 31% of respondents who did, 53% said they thought the fees were about right, 30% thought they were too high and 4% thought they were too low. 18% of those surveyed were unsure if they’d seen the new fee information or not."

The FMA is getting a little wayward with its use of numbers. The data it threw out around so-called life insurance was poor, or more technically, statistically unreliable.

DAILY NZX REPORT

If you are interested in the NZ sharemarket we have added a daily market close report on the site. This is posted each night around 6pm and gives you a good wrap of what happened during the day.

Here is the most recent one.