Survey: Financial advisers not so popular with millionaires Millionaires are the bread-and-butter clients of financial advisers, but planners may not be doing enough to keep this important clan content, a new Fidelity survey suggests. About 45 percent of millionaireswould not recommendtheir financial adviser to friends or family members, according to a Fidelity Investments' survey of 1,287 affluent investors.(Investment News)
I am in investment advisor and I agree. Most high net worth clients are hot money with unrealistic expectations. You never hear from them when you are making them money but when you have even a modest drawdown, they head for the exits en masse. This, of course, does not apply to hedge funds, where HNW clients are eager to spread their cheeks and endure 30% plus drawdowns just for the previlege of paying 2%/20%.
I finally convinced a friend of mine to dump his adviser after he suddenly realized he was smart enough to figure it out on his own, and the annual hit from the fees had a HUGE impact on his long term net worth.
I forget what the actual number was, but it was like 70-75% of money managers do worse than the benchmark. In reality, they do no better of worse than the benchmark, but because of their overhead and fees, they do much worse. The study also showed that higher management fees never correlated to higher performance.
If a financial adviser were any good he'd be a trader. If you're a failed trader you can always be a financial adviser. Same goes with equities analysts and sales traders. - If you are incompetent at something, idiots may still pay you for "advice" on that thing. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.