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A Good Investment Adviser Is Hard To Find.
Why is it so hard to find a great investment advisor? How do you know if s/he is looking out for your best interests? One investor conducted research to find out.
Great doctors, tutors, ad agencies or actors, are always busy. They’re hard to find because they are working for someone else. Waiting in line becomes the new rule. When you’re very good at what you do, you naturally attract a following. When you do a great job, word-of-mouth follows you like viral marketing.
Some say it’s just one of those facts of life. Actually, it’s basic economics: when demand is specifically stimulated in one area, it highlights the dearth of supply for similar quality. There are only so many great experts to go around.
Why would it be any different with investment advisers? Like architects, accountants, or actors, they come in all shapes and sizes. The problem of finding and keeping a good one seems to be magnified by how much money one has to invest. It logically follows that if an investment adviser is paid strictly by commissions, the more money he manages, the more money he makes.
What would you do? ‘Show me the money!’ is the old expression. This is not to say that there aren’t investment advisers who won’t work with you because you don’t have millions to invest. Investment advisers come with different sets of motivation. There are IA’s who would rather work only with women, others who like to specialize with those under 40, those who focus only on professionals, or independent business owners; some zero in on seniors, or mature adults, those older than 55.
Each of these respective target groups has its own dynamics and challenges. There are IA’s to fit every single market segment’s needs. It seems that the most important factor to some might simply be the amount of money you have to invest; or how much time it might take to service that client’s account.
The only two things any great adviser has to offer are her time and her expertise. Her time is a constant; it’s the expertise that really counts...or access to it. Time is the one constant. Every expert or investment adviser has only so much available ‘time’ to spend on his profession. Each investment adviser has only so much time to dedicate to the servicing and management of each client’s portfolio. Naturally the larger the portfolio, the more time that might be allocated.
Some are very efficient and make the best use of this scarce resource. Others are not so fortunate. Which one you get depends on how you shop around, how diligent you are in your choice; what questions you ask during your search. Research has shown that one of the ways IA’s greatly improve their efficiency and the accuracy of their work is to use as many digital, automated tools as they can.
These tools help them speed up and improve the accuracy of their research and calculations of various equity opportunities, given the prevailing conditions in the market. This is where the advantages of the Internet come into play.
Today the majority of independent stock investors use the Internet. They conduct research, inform themselves about current conditions, and/or do their calculations or projections of market moves. I personally know of one investor who decided to see if he could put together a multiplicity of information sources – in a much different format than usual – so that folks like him could work either by themselves or more closely with their own IA, in the management of their portfolio.
As part of his overall research, in late January of this year, he did market research and learned some things that readers may find very interesting. Because he is particularly interested in independence and objectivity, he asked the question: “...How concerned are you that your Investment Adviser might not be totally objective – i.e. that he/she might be influenced by other incentives vis-à-vis the investment advice he/she gives you?”
Some might say that the answers he got were to be expected. It was also surprising to learn that 80% of investors with more than $100K in the market spend up to 10 hours per month online—some much more—researching their stocks. To me, this begs a new question: why are they spending this much time online if they have an IA?