Financial Advice: Worth the Price?

Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Lauren Young asks the question: How valuable is your financial advisor?

Focusing specifically on the question of which financial products might be uniquely available to you because of your financial advisor, Lauren quotes Dave on the virtues of Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA).

Some fund families primarily cater to financial advisers, so it can be difficult to buy their funds on your own. Austin-based Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) sets a high hurdle for advisers who want to sell its index funds, which rely on quantitative modeling. “They want people to understand the science of their funds … and they want people who are going to be intelligent users of what they have to offer,” says David Yeske, a certified financial planner at Yeske Buie in San Francisco. He sat through a two-day seminar at a Santa Monica (Calif.) hotel and, after additional vetting to make sure he had a buy-and-hold philosophy, got approval to distribute DFA funds to his clients. The lure for Yeske is DFA’s microcap and international small-company value funds, which have below-average expenses and above-average performance.