Texaslib
Austin,#2Consumer Comment
Sat, October 03, 2009
I am a satisfied client of Fisher Investments. I would like to make a couple of points about the original report.
1. I cannot comment the verbal comments the author of the original report says he received regarding whether the fee specified in the contract would actually be collected or not. However, any time I sign a contract which clearly states that I owe a fee I expect I will be required to pay it regardless of any verbal conversations I have with a sales person.
2. The fee is justified. At least in my case, Fisher did a considerable amount of work looking at my portfolio I was thinking of moving to them and creating a proposal of how they would invest and manage my assets. They prepared a report which included specifics of how I would be invested across several dimensions (stocks vs. bonds, US vs. World Markets, and industry sectors). They prepared a report which included simulations of how their two alternative recommendations may perform under pessimistic, optimistic, and "average" market conditions over a long period of time. You can do this type of simulation yourself for free at some web sites (Fidelity for example), but it takes an awful lot of work to set it up and you have to know how you plan to spread your portfolio across asset and risk categories. If you already know that much about investing, why would you want to bother with a portfolio manager in the first place.
3. I don't understand the behavior of the person making the original report. What does he mean that he is unsatisfied with their "wholesale approach to money management". What is a "wholesale approach" in the first place? I would not choose those words at all to describe how Fisher manages money. Anyway, he opened an account on 12/11/2007 and closed it on 1/7/2008. That is less than a month. It took that much time for Fisher to set up a new account for me at my custodian (Fidelity) get my assets transferred into it from an existing account under management by Fidelity Professional Asset management, and to reposition me from the funds Fidelity had me in to the stocks, bond funds, and international ETF's Fisher recommended. My point here is that the author of the report could not possibly have learned anything new about Fisher's money management approach in the time he allowed that he did not already learn during the sales and analysis cycle.