Dan Ariely doesn't think much of certain advisors.
"The benefit that financial advisors are providing their clients, in terms of balancing the portfolio, cannot justify the amount they are charging for their service," says the professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University.
Ariely, who has been all over the industry lecture circuit of late (most recently at FPA Denver 2010 in early October) is just one of the industry personalities rounded up in the December 2010 Investment Advisor cover story by columnist Olivia Mellan for a revealing conversation about the future of financial advice.
In addition to Ariely, Mellan's piece, entitled "Future Imperfect: Six Pioneering Advisors and Observers Present a Likely View of the Essentially Unknowable" features Mary Malgoire, president of The Family Firm in Bethesda, Md.; Shlomo Benartzi, a UCLA professor and author of "Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle": Richard Wagner, founder of Denver, Colo.-based financial planning firm WorthLiving; Elissa Buie, a principal of Yeske Buie, a financial planning and asset management firm in Vienna, Va.; and Richard Vodra , president of Worldview Two Planning, also in Virginia.
"To help you find your way toward this uncertain future, I asked several well-respected thinkers and planners about the most significant challenges that financial advisors will face," Mellan writes. "From the deeply philosophical to the practical, and from global issues to community concerns, I think you will be interested in what [they] have to say."
