Best own goal

Monday, June 26th 2006, 7:27AM

One of the best goals last week was at the Success Forum in Auckland, not the football World Cup in Germany.
I have long argued that some of the finance company rating services in the market are not particularly helpful and in some cases darn right dangerous.

Likewise, I have argued that calling a service a ranking service and not a rating service is meaningless semantics.

Yes, the labels may be true, but punters and advisers don't know the difference, or don't care to note the difference.

If someone saw that Provincial Finance had an ABA ranking with AAA being the best possible score and EEE the worst, then they would think it was solid as.

We know that is wrong.

You can put all the disclaimers in the world on the service and it still won't work.

Why do I say this?

Well the founder and developer of the ranking service got up in front of a significant crowd at the Success Forum and said: "We rated Provincial Finance an ABA," before hurriedly correcting himself and saying that in fact it was a ranking.
If the founder and developer can't get it right what hope is there that anyone else will?

I rest my case.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please email them through to me at Blog@goodreturns.co.nz

PS: A number of people have commented that these comments are just a competitor having a dig at a fellow competitor. Good Returns does compete with this organisation in the provision of data, but doesn't compete in this area which could loosely be called research. So I don't buy that argument.

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