disappointment with Fidelity Premimum Services

My experience has been similar.

My impression of Fidelity is that any interaction beyond a simple administrative request goes to a sales-droid-like person.

By contrast, Vanguard seems to have customer-service-like people who are very knowledgeable.

YMMV.

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My experience with several banks has been similar. They push you towards whatever it is that helps them. When it comes to managing your money, you're on your own. Even if they were to steer you to specific funds, they would most likely show you funds that had a good recent performance and that will likely drop in the near future.

If you really must invest in stocks and bonds, do so via index funds and do some independent reading on what might be a good balance for you. Given that no one knows how the market will perform in the short or long term, all of this is akin to pulling numbers out of a hat. Do some reading and do what feels comfortable to you.

But I'd also like to point you to

I havefound his advice very useful.

That's unfortunate. Note, however, that such an "account rep" is likely

*not* acting as a registered investment advisor - he's acting, at best, as a rep of a broker-dealer - ie. he's in a position to sell you things and subject, at best, to a "suitability" standard, not a fiduciary one.

If you're not paying for investment advice, you shouldn't expect to get investment advice. You were not talking to an investment advisor, nor were you paying this person to act as one.

That said, I've never found the Fidelity folks to be anything less than amazingly helpful - when I knew what I wanted. They can help you manage a rollover between accounts, open or close accounts, even execute a transaction. But asking them for investment advice is asking for trouble.

He may well not be *allowed* to. If so, he should have told you.

Again - were you paying a investment advisor for advice or were you talking to salespeople and hoping that you'd get "free" advice out of the deal? There's a huge difference.

Or get advice from someone with not products to sell you. Note that you'll probably have to write that someone a check - if he's not getting paid to sell you things, he's still got to get paid somehow for providing that advice.

That said, I generally recommend index or index-like funds (there are a lot of great "passively" managed funds which are built for low-cost, low-turnover, etc but which are not strictly index funds).

Bodie's been interesting for a long time. Of course, in the last couple of years, he's looked like a genius - he's been recommending minimal or no equity exposure and massive TIPS exposure for years. That was a brilliant strategy for the last couple of years, and likely horrificly bad strategy going forward, given where TIPS yields are right now. Trailing 3-yr total return on the iShares TIP index ETF are in the 9% range (NAV and price differ). A little bit of that was yield, a little bit was inflation adjustments, and a big chunk was capital gains as the yield got squashed down to pretty much nothing. This last bit cannot happen again and, if anything, is likely to reverse. That said, his latest book should probably be on my reading list. It looks like he's got a new one out only a day or two ago, and I'd be interested to see how he's updated his recommendations lately.

It was an investment advisor at the brokerage that had been assigned to me.

I have no problem writing a check if I know the advice is going to be useful. The last time I wrote such a check was for a financial planner at American Express (back when Ameriprise was part of American Express), and it was a total waste (both of my time and money). In fact there was a class action law suit and I got a tiny bit of that back!

There are so many variables that it is impossible to predict with any degree of certainty what the outcome is likely to be. So one has to pick an approach, any approach, and roll with it.

Investment advisors don't get "assigned" - they get *hired* by you, after you review their qualifications and agree to some payment method. And they generally don't work directly for brokerages!

It's all in the marketing. As Consumer Reports writes in its current (Feb 2012) issue in its article on brokerage services: "The company representatives had titles such as 'account executive' [Fidelity uses that one], 'financial adviser,' 'financial consultant,' 'financial planning specialist,' and 'investment adviser.'"

Premium customers (over $250K at Fidelity) do indeed get assigned an account executive (aka "advisor") "who'll provide you with one-on-one guidance consultations".

As to the value of the services at Fidelity, I agree with David that the service quality is excellent, but I also agree with most of the people in this thread that the "advice" isn't. Here's a thread in Morningstar (to which I've also posted) where the consensus is different (mostly positive, aside from Portfolio Advisory Services (PAS)). I posted there a link to Fidelity's compensation schedule, and noted that this goes toward explaining why people are getting nudged (it's a little softer than pushing :-) toward PAS and annuities (highest trailing fees for the advisor, um, rep).

If you are about to leave this advisor or find a new one, it might be good to ask them about local/state tax issues. I think these are harder to get information about on the internet or whatever. For instance doesn't Florida have a stiff inheritance tax, so even if the feds let you off the hook (like 2010?) Florida will reclaim every cent (40%?) that you didn't pay the feds.