Incredible Shrinking Management Fee – MoneyBeat – WSJ
Incredible Shrinking Management Fee: Paying 1% for mechanical #portfolio mgt v flat fees for a #financial advisor
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/03/07/the-incredible-shrinking-management-fee
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That will cost you, on average, about 1% of your assets every year, even though the process is often highly mechanical and a computer can do it for nothing, as WiseBanyan shows with its “algorithmic” method of determining which portfolios to recommend.
Oddly, many “financial advisers” barely give advice at all. Scott Smith, a director at Cerulli Associates, a research firm based in Boston, estimates that 9% of roughly 300,000 financial advisers in the U.S. do nothing but manage portfolios; only about 26% provide comprehensive advice on financial planning.
Many of these advisers are itching to beat the market by picking individual securities or by “tactically” whizzing in and out of stocks. A few might succeed, but most don’t; overall, that
hyperactivity lowers clients’ returns instead of raising them. So you pay a lot but often get only a little.
Meanwhile, the enormously valuable counsel that a good financial adviser can provide–how to manage the complexities of tax, estate and retirement planning, for example–usually comes at no additional cost.
“It’s absurd,” says James Miller of Woodward Financial Advisors, a firm in Chapel Hill, N.C. “Why should clients’ fees be based solely on the size of their investment portfolio when what they really want is financial-planning advice?”
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