Beware harbingers of doom, especially if you plan to retire

Two chapters cover improving decisions in creating wealth and conclude that too many people fail miserably to plan for retirement. I'd go along with that. Recent estimates suggest that as many as 85 per cent will rely on state and family to get by in retirement.

They also concluded that the cost of saving too little is far greater than saving too much. As they put it, there are many ways to cope with having saved too much - retiring early, spoiling the grandkids - but coping with the opposite is far less pleasant.

The most important step is to enrol in a pension plan. Money going in saves income tax, profits rise tax free and a decent chunk on retirement is also tax free. In many instances the employer puts in payments too.

But in a US industry-wide survey they found a third of people don't bother enrolling. In a study covering 25 final-salary schemes half the employees didn't bother signing up.

That is akin to not cashing your salary. They also covered what they called naive investing. Their final conclusion is that even those who bother taking out pension plans almost always invest badly.

But why do so many people avoid pension plans and invest their savings badly? Thaler and Sunstein didn't say it but I believe it's because too many pessimists are quoted daily in the mass media and too many busybody academics are grinding their axes.

While I was away there was an epidemic of bad news. Aye, it happens there too - my auntie in Canada reckons we're all going down the pan. Meanwhile, investors are dumping stock market assets like there's no tomorrow. So by how much has the FTSE fallen recently? Well, it's up more than 2 per cent.

Of course, economists insist that the FTSE doesn't know what it's doing. That means it never has done, for equities are still the best investments for long-term savers since 1900.

But recently the bad news brigade has attacked from another flank, confusing investors even more.

Consumer Focus, a quango which normally covers energy prices and postal services, using internet survey panels of people with little else to do and who are paid peanuts for their troubles, published a report claiming that independent financial advisers (IFAs) are churning their clients' pension plans to increase commissions.

This shock-horror report, covered widely in the national media, is 60 pages long but has so many holes in it that you can use it in your kitchen as a colander.

What evidence does Consumer Focus have? It's based on 401 responses of people who say they use IFAs. Other findings are based on a study of 34 pension complaints over a ten-year period. The information used in the report is already out of date.

It claims that trail commissions - paid to IFAs for ongoing service - have been rising by 10 per cent over the past two years, which it says is unfair. There's also a wee claim that initial commissions have fallen by about 25 per cent. If they'd bothered to check they'd know they've actually fallen 30 per cent, and that's a significant difference.

How can commissions and churning be increasing, if commissions paid are falling substantially?

Regarding IFAs, how does Consumer Focus check that its panel knows what an IFA is? And why does the report only cover IFAs? The questions asked of the internet panel of paid informants also covered bank advisers but no further mention is made of them.

Since April 2010 we have funded a UK-wide study carried out by independent consultants who supply statistics using unpaid face-to-face interviews representative of UK socio-economic groupings. The survey, which has taken in 16,000 interviews, found that banks are 12 times more likely to mis-sell than IFAs. So why didn't the Consumer Focus report cover banks?

Maybe it's something to do with the fact that its chair is the only person on the board with any knowledge about financial services - because she is also director of public policy at Barclays Bank.

• Alan Steel is chairman of Alan Steel Asset Management