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The article focuses on the significance of consulting the best adviser before giving out investment advice in the U.S. It is noted that some investment brokers are compelled to follow fiduciary standard at a higher level. Investors are recommended to consider the confusing different credentials of the brokers.

Most investors don't realize that when they walk into a bank or brokerage firm branch, the representatives there are essentially free to emblazon their business cards with whatever titles they please -- financial consultants, advisers, wealth managers, to name a few. But if you're looking for someone who is qualified to give smart advice about all aspects of your financial life while keeping costs down, you may not be in the right place. The issue came up again earlier this week in an article by my colleagues at The New York Times, who quoted former JPMorgan Chase brokers as saying they were encouraged to promote the firm's own funds to customers even when more competitive investments were available. Not only were the funds expensive, but the bank also exaggerated at least one investment portfolio's returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some big retirement plans offer investors the chance to hire an independent adviser that can help them choose their investments. But your plan provider will soon be able to offer the advice itself, as long as it meets rules issued recently by the Department of Labor. Before the new regulations, which are effective Dec. 27, 401(k), individual retirement plan providers were required to hire an independent adviser to provide advice. That's because the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, the law known as Erisa that governs retirement plans, prohibited advisers from recommending investments if they were paid for other services like administering the plans in the first place. This was to avoid conflicts of interest where the administrator would put its own mutual funds on the menu and push them on participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would you do if your financial planner prescribed the following advice? Save and invest diligently for 30 years, then cross your fingers and pray your investments will double over the last decade before you retire. You might as well go to Las Vegas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most everyone needs financial advice. The big question is how much. There are tens of thousands of advisers out there, with varying levels of expertise, who charge varying fees for their services. And professional advice doesn't guarantee good returns. You need look no further for evidence than the market collapse of 2008-9, when most people lost money, even those with the supposedly ideal mix of investments, hand-picked by their financial planners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Target-date funds have come under fire in recent months for failing to shelter investors, especially those near retirement, from the market maelstrom. Many of the funds -- which are supposed to have an increasingly conservative investment mix as an investor reaches a retirement date -- failed investors last year. But so did a lot of broadly diversified portfolios carefully customized by financial planners. The market collapse spared no one (except for those heavily invested in Treasuries, of course). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]