By: Matthew Arndt, CFA, CPA, CFP | December 10, 2009 | Financial Advisors, How to Select Advisors

Is your adviser charging you both a commission and a fee? This practice of receiving compensation from two sources is not necessarily illegal but is a question of ethics and a grave one at that.
Recently this came to my attention when I sat down with a prospective client who was with an adviser at [...]

By: Matthew Arndt, CFA, CPA, CFP | December 9, 2009 | Investor Information

Where do you get your financial advice? The newspapers? Financial Media? Journalists? Wall Street analysts? You may want to be careful about where you get your information and about those who advertise themselves as “experts.” There is a serious “expert” problem in the investment industry. There are some who can be quite insightful, but the [...]

By: Jack WaymirecloseAuthor: Jack Waymire Name: Jack Waymire
Email: jack@paladinregistry.com
Site: http://paladinregistry.com
About: Jack writes for the InvestorWatchdog website and Worth magazine. He worked in the financial services industry from 1976 to 2004. For twenty of those years he was the president of a Registered Investment Advisory firm and a Broker/Dealer. Jack is the author of Who's Watching Your Money? The 17 Paladin Principles for Selecting a Financial Advisor and is a co-founder of PaladinRegistry.com.See Authors Posts (87) | December 7, 2009 | Bad Financial Advice, Bad Products & Services

You have read hundreds of stories describing Ponzi schemes and other illegal investment scams. But, investor losses from those scams are a drop in the bucket compared to legal investment scams.
Legal scams are perpetrated by unscrupulous, licensed advisors who deliberately sell bad investment products that benefit them or their companies. An example of a bad [...]

By: Matthew Arndt, CFA, CPA, CFP | December 7, 2009 | The Politicians, The Regulators

Either some journalists are really naïve or they are complicit in trying to pull the wool over taxpayers’ eyes. Today’s headline, US Cuts Estimate of Bank Bailout Costs and the statement, “The Obama administration had estimated the cost to taxpayers of the $700-billion Troubled Asset relief Program, or TARP, would be $341 billion but now [...]

By: Matthew Arndt, CFA, CPA, CFP | December 6, 2009 | The Politicians, Wall Street Ethics

Where is the financial industry overhaul we were promise? We wonder why no meaningful legislation has been passed to protect investors and taxpayers from another banking collapse. All you need to do is look at the amounts that members of congress received in just the 2007-2008 election cycle from commercial banking interests to understand why [...]

By: Matthew Arndt, CFA, CPA, CFP | December 2, 2009 | Financial Advisors, Investor Information

On the surface, a broker and a fee-based adviser look exactly the same to most investors. In the investors mind the distance between the two is quite narrow, but in reality the structuring of their incentives are vastly different with significant implications. In a former post, “Ripped Off: Who is Paying Your Financial Advisor”, someone [...]