OldShooter
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Sorry. I disagree. This allows the FA to simply follow Will Rogers' investing advice: "If it don't go up, don't buy it." Building a portfolio that backtests well is trivially easy.What I would do is say if I put $xxx,xxx with you today, what tickers would you put me in an how much in each? If they won't tell you then walk. If they do tell you, then run a Portolio Visualizer run of their portfolio vs yours and look at things like volatility, return, drawdown, etc. and make an informed decision. Or you could give them a small amount invest and then put in more if you are happy with their results.
The OP knows what works. He has been doing it. We also know, from 50+ years of data, what doesn't work. Stock picking. @firewhen, if you want to reinforce that you are doing the right thing, I recommend "Winning the Loser's Game" by Charles Ellis https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Losers-Game-Strategies-Successful-dp-1264258461/dp/1264258461 (latest edition, May 2021) It's a random world out there.
It wasn't real complex. I've been with Schwab for 20 or 30 years and am comfortable with them as a brokerage house. I think I can trust them to run the money in a very conservative buy & hold passive fashion. I also think that their corporate culture will probably give us trust managers who are quality people in dealing with DS and the grands. Finally, and not the least consideration, their fee was IIRC 60 or 70bps. DW retired as an SVP with a megabank investments and trust department where the fees started at 150bps. She also did not feel that a bank trust officer would pay much attention to trusts that were only six and low seven figures. I wish I could say that we did extensive interviewing, etc., but we did not. One of the grands' trusts is special needs and we may do some investigating of some of the nonprofits that specialize in running these. But the child is a teen right now and we are sort of waiting to see what happens as he enters adulthood.Can you share a bit of your thinking in choosing Schwab Trust for this job? Nothing too specific or personal.