Best of 1000!

When Jen and I completed our first round of 600 financial professionals and decided on Our Pick for best financial professional, we thought we had done a pretty good job. Then, we asked ourselves why 600? Neither of us really knew, we just thought is was a good number at the time. So, we decided to expand our search to 1000 financial professionals. This time, we focused more on independent brokers and insurance 'wealth managers' along with people from the major brokerages. Our biggest challenge that we have heard to this point is that independent brokers have greater flexibility in providing services to their clients. Here's what we found: independent brokers are just as money hungry, if not more so, than those who work for major brokerages. Of course, this is just our opinion and, naturally, there are some great financial professionals who are independent. However, we found the above to be the average of our experiences. Along with this, we found that independent brokers were more likely to use market timing and options as investment strategies, presumably because they don't have such heavy oversight as those who work for larger firms. In the end, Our Pick hasn't changed. We are just that much more behind Eric as our selection.