David Booth on the Power of Professional Advice

Sometimes when people hear our story, I think they think, that's all interesting, but so how am I supposed to invest the money? Trying to outguess the market doesn't make sense and there's a whole bunch of index funds out there. You know, which ones should I use, and, you know, what percentages? How do I put things together? That's where professional advices comes in. Investing is inherently complex and fraught with uncertainty. What's important is learning how to deal with uncertainty. And that, I think most people would benefit from having a professional advisor helping them with their investment decision. What a professional advisor can do is sit down with a client and first talk about the goals of the client. Why is the client interested in investing at all? And let's say it's saving for retirement. To having an adequate retirement income. That's a goal. With that goal in mind, then all of a sudden we kinda know what risk means to that person. It's a shortfall in meeting that goal. In this case, having inadequate income in retirement. That's the risk. So an advisor then can show clients the range of outcomes that can occur with various investment approaches and talk it through and relate it to their goals. And at the end of it help the client make an informed decision about the best way to proceed. You can meet with a client and help the client determine the best overall investment approach for them. It's a very personalized process. So it's about solutions, not individual products. It's about forming an overall investment approach that gives the client the best chance of winning. Whatever winning means to them.