Even though the best financial consultant you could ever hire is staring back at you in the mirror every day, here are ten tips to help you find that one out of every 1000 financial consultants who is actually pretty good.
To help me make this list, I thought about some of the completely useless investment strategies I had learned at the world's top investment firms and the ridiculous focus of some boutique firms I had talked to when making the long-tail investment strategies that make up the curriculum at my SmartKnowledgeU campus.
About five years ago, when I was just starting to develop and test the investment strategies I still use today, I interviewed with a smaller, boutique investment firm in the Bay Area of San Francisco that has a great reputation in the media for being on the cutting edge of revolutionary investment strategies. I thought to myself that my interview with this firm would be the best way to find out how far the best investment firms have changed their strategies to take into account the changing information landscape and find better investment opportunities. Needless to say, I was shocked to find that this firm's strategies were almost exactly the same as those of every other Wall Street investment firm.
A top manager at this company then asked me five important questions, or at least questions that he thought were important for making smart investment decisions. But I thought his questions were either not important or too vague to be useful. I couldn't believe that this company had been able to get billions of dollars from private people. After seeing how incompetent this top manager at a top investment firm in the United States was, I was just convinced that hundreds of thousands of people have been tricked and taken advantage of by very strong salesmen who can make it look like they know a lot about investments but don't know much about them at all.
The only problem with this situation is that most people don't know the right questions to ask, so they never find out that the people they trust don't know much. If investors don't know the right questions to ask, they could ask a hundred questions and still not get answers that help them figure out how good a financial advisor is. If you ask better questions and listen to better answers, you can increase your earnings by three, four, or even more.
So here are 10 questions to help you get started:
I don't like mutual funds. I know all about their hidden costs in addition to the fees they charge, and I don't like that a lot of foreign mutual funds get hit hard whenever people start to worry about a market pullback. I think it's a much better idea to own individual stocks, especially on foreign markets.
I'm going to tell you the truth. 6 percent , 7 percent even 10 percent a year doesn't cut it for me.
b>(4)
This question is a follow-up question to (3). If the answer to question three is, say, China, Canada, and Australia, then ask, "How much of my portfolio should be in Chinese, Canadian, and Australian stocks, and why?"
For example, if your financial consultant says no more than 20 percent, you could ask, "If you're sure that China, India, and Australia will be the best markets for the next five years, why are we only putting 20 percent of my portfolio there?"
I don't want you to use the same strategy for diversifying my portfolio as you do for everyone else here. I don't agree with it and think it's a terrible way to get rich. Look at all the great investors who got rich by figuring out which assets were the best and then putting most of their money into just a few of those asset classes.
Even if you say, "Look at Warren Buffet. He was a "buy and hold" investor," we live in different times for investing now. Once upon a time, the horse and buggy was the best way to get around. Investing has changed, and what worked in the past is not necessarily the best way to invest today.
How do you use technology and easier access to top-notch financial, economic, and political information to come up with new ways to give me the best chance of making great returns?
- How will you make sure it's safe for me to invest in developing markets?
Many of the best-performing markets are emerging ones, which are also prone to big drops. And remember that I don't like mutual funds, and I also don't think they're safe.
(10) Tell me three things you do with my money that no one else at your firm does and why.
Visit the Free Educational Resources at http://www.smartknowledgeu.com to find out what many of the answers to these questions should be. If the answers to all of the above questions are smart, you may have just found a winner.
