January 29, 2019

Are We Able to Judge Financial Advisers?

Let’s get this out of the way first: the vast majority of financial advisers would not take advantage of you.

But that doesn’t eliminate the problem of discerning whether an individual adviser can be trusted. About 7 percent of U.S. advisers have misconduct records in civil or regulatory proceedings.  If someone draws an unlucky card and picks a bad one, how would they know?

In certain situations, they might not. A new study finds that various things can trip people up and make them trust an adviser who is giving out bad advice. These influences included a good first impression of the adviser. And one way for an adviser to make a good first impression is by initially confirming the client’s own views on investing before introducing poor advice.

The subject of this study – judging the quality of financial advice – is important at a time workers are carrying a heavy load of responsibilities for managing their 401(k) accounts, and the accounts are becoming more critical to their retirement outlook.

The adviser study was conducted by an international group of researchers. Their online experiment was done in Australia, where employers are required to provide workers with a retirement savings and investment plan – Superannuation Accounts – similar to 401(k)s.

Trust is tricky to evaluate, and the researchers put a lot of thought into designing the experiment to minimize flaws in the results. They asked nearly 1,300 Australians to evaluate advice online about four investment topics. Under each topic, one adviser presented good advice, while the other presented bad. The researchers varied the order for presenting the good and bad advice to the participants.

They generally had a good sense of when they were getting good advice. But there were exceptions: …Learn More