Be skeptical of people who want to sell you things

There’s a reason why Warren Buffett’s “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful” line lives rent-free in many investors’ heads.

On that note, I’m just going to put these two headlines from the past 48 hours beside one another.

Shot:

(via Bloomberg)

He’s singling out private credit here, a subset of private markets. But Dimon has previously castigated pension funds for their ample holdings of private assets as a general matter. And, of course, as the guy who runs America’s biggest bank, he’s got his fingers in all of these markets, and yes, is even expanding JPM’s footprint in some of them.

Chaser:

(from The Wall Street Journal)

More deets from the WSJ: “An order could help pave the way for big managers of private assets such as Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to access the vast sums of retirement savings held by workers who don’t have a traditional pension. Institutional investors such as pension funds have largely maxed out on private markets, leading firms to look to individual investors for new sources of growth.”

This is not investing advice. This is just advice. When someone is very eager to sell you something because they have run out of other people to sell it to, you should maybe be a little skeptical.

(Perhaps even more skeptical if the product being hawked were, hypothetically, a high-fee investment vehicle.)