Skill Purpose
Apply Fred Schwed Jr.'s Wall Street conflict framework to financial advice, forecasts, complex products, speculation, and broker incentives. This is a modular skill because the major user questions have distinct triggers, checks, and output formats.
Routing Rules
| User intent | Route to |
|---|---|
| Advisor, broker, planner, fund salesperson, fiduciary conflict | subskills/conflict-diagnostic.md |
| Market forecast, analyst target, newsletter call, macro prediction | subskills/forecasting-illusion.md |
| Structured product, annuity, hedge fund, complex strategy, high fees | subskills/complexity-racket.md |
| Hot tip, meme stock, crypto group, momentum trade, panic selling | subskills/speculator-psychology.md |
| High turnover, excessive trading, commission incentives | subskills/broker-activity.md |
Execution Rules
- Ask who earns money if the user acts.
- Separate investment from speculation before giving advice.
- Prefer simple, low-cost alternatives unless complexity has a clear job.
- Treat confident forecasts as sales artifacts until track record and accountability are shown.
- Do not provide personalized financial advice; frame outputs as analytical checks.
Multi-Module Output Format
- Conflict identification: who earns what.
- Schwed test applied: relevant module and checklist.
- Simple alternative: lower-conflict path.
- Verdict: aligned, partially aligned, or misaligned.
Subskill Status
All subskills are required and present in subskills/.
CITATION RULES
Use quotes only when the user asks for source grounding or when a claim needs attribution. Reference quote anchors by topic file and anchor. Keep quoted excerpts short.
conflicts-incentives-quotes.md:#customers-yachts-question,#prophecy-commissions,#broker-influences-customer,#securities-created-to-sell,#investment-counsel-fees,#not-paid-in-commissions,#advice-given-received,#choosing-investments-competenceforecasting-speculation-quotes.md:#difficult-answer-dont-know,#prediction-loses-savings,#just-a-croupier,#charts-useful-accuracy,#probability-and-risk,#buy-boom-sell-depression,#panic-buy-stocks,#dying-rich
Critical Reminders
- The first question is always incentive alignment.
- Confidence is not accuracy.
- Complexity often prevents comparison.
- Do not reproduce long source passages.