Professional Money Management with Fisher Investments

Picking the right money manager

Unless you decide to self-manage, you'll be hiring someone to provide advice. Whether that person merely makes product suggestions based on an investment strategy you craft, like a broker, or is making all decisions for your portfolio, like a private portfolio manager, it's important to understand what is driving their decision-making. In addition, you should understand whether that person has a verifiable history of making sound decisions.

At minimum, be sure to ask the person you're thinking of hiring the following:

• Is your firm responsible for making or recommending ongoing changes to my asset allocation mix?
• How would my asset mix change if you forecast a bear market? A bull market?
• Who's responsible for making those forecasts?
• Is the company independent? Are there any conflicts of interest in your goals and mine?
• How does your firm get compensated to manage my money? Aside from what I pay you, what other compensation do you receive?
• When your firm contacts clients, is it primarily to sell products?

Those questions are a good start, however, to more fully understand how someone will steer your assets, the following list of questions is a useful guide.

To learn ways you can benefit by choosing Fisher Investments as your prospective money manager, click here.