Be wary of performance-chasing financial advisers

[REWahoo]

From a Marketwatch.com article:

Too hot to handle
Be wary of performance-chasing financial advisers

Nearing the end of this mediocre year for stocks, your adviser may feel extra pressure to swing for the fences. But investment experts warn that you should view such zealousness with alarm.

How do you know if your financial pro is overexposing you to a hot area? If you don't ask questions and the bet pays off, "then you never really know," says Ross Levin, president of Accredited Investors Inc., an Edina, Minn., financial-planning firm. "It's only after a bad experience that you say, 'How could I have fallen for that?'"

My question is (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here), if you have to watch the moves your "financial pro" makes and have knowledge of what moves might be bad for your portfolio, why do you need him/her in the first place?

http://tinyurl.com/anz28

[Spanky]

A lot of people rely completely on their advisors because they do not want to spend any time or effort in fincancial planning.

Well, this article could be for the dumb investor who relies on a FP, and gets a call tomorrow in which FP says: "Hey, we haven't done so well this year, but I've got some investments that might make up for it."

If that investor read that article, he might say "No, let's just stay with that high-expense, high-load fund that you put me in last January."