Does this sound familiar? When you first met your financial advisor, they told you they were going to personally take care of your investments. That they would monitor your portfolio.
They made promises. They promised you they would research each stock, bond or mutual fund they recommend for your portfolio. They also told you that they would make sure that if any stock, bond or mutual fund was not performing up to their expectations, they would notify you to discuss making the necessary changes.
They would call you to make recommendations. They would discuss with you over the phone to get your agreement to make the change or meet with you in person to go over their recommendations. They promised that they would do this for each of your accounts and every time they identified that a change was necessary.
That sounded great. Finally, an advisor who was going to take care of me, you thought to yourself. This advisor will watch the markets, research individual stocks, bonds or mutual funds and will call me to make recommendations when necessary.
Then reality sets in. Your advisor only seems to call you when they have an investment recommendation they want you to consider. They never seem to call you to recommend you sell an investment that is doing poorly unless you bring it to their attention.
Then the market corrects. You wait for THE phone call. Why has your advisor not called within the first few days of a correction? You may not hear from your advisor at all unless you call them first. Perhaps you get a broadcast email or letter from them explaining what happened in the markets and maybe a recommendation concerning what you should do with your portfolio and to call them for an appointment.
You may begin to wonder. Why is your advisor not living up to their promises? They put on a great presentation when you first met and made many promises that they have failed to keep.
Why is that? Have you ever considered that your advisor may be overwhelmed, that they really do not have time to follow through with their promises?
Consider this. The average successful financial advisor may have, on average, 500 to well over 1,000 or more clients. When you consider that your advisor will need to have a phone discussion or an in-office meeting with every client to review their portfolio the task becomes real big. Each phone conversation may take a minimum of 20-25 minutes and each office appointment will take up to an hour. How many phone appointments or in-office appointments can they really have in a day? Then add in the time they need to process the paperwork after each meeting. It can take them weeks or even months to contact, meet and make changes to all their client’s portfolios.
There’s more. Your advisor is running a business. They must manage their staff, do investment research and grow their business by finding new clients. When you add up all the non-client time involved in running their business, how much time does your advisor realistically have to look after you?
During a market correction, who do you think your advisor will call first? Clients that have $10,000,000 or more or clients that have less than $100,000 with them. Obviously, they are going to call their top clients first.
There is a better way. Some advisors will not break their promises to you. They are known as discretionary portfolio managers who, through their registration and licencing are fiduciaries by law and must follow the fair-dealing-law. Under this law, they are required to treat all their clients equally. This means that when they need to make an investment change to their clients’ portfolios, every client with similar portfolios must have the same changes made to their portfolios at the exact time and for the exact same price as everyone else.
I cover this extensively in my book Who’s Investing Your Money? – 7 Key Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor. This book examines the various types of advisor registrations, their limits and abilities and will help you find the right advisor for you.
To learn more about how a Discretionary Portfolio Manager can better help you, please call me at (604) 855-6846 or email me at aspitters@pfcwealthsolutions.com
Who’s investing your Money is available as a free PDF download at www.whosinvestingyourmoney.com
