3. Experience. What licenses, certifications and/or credentials do you have?
Many of the top advisors in the industry have designations such as certified public accountant (CPA), certified financial planner (CFP), certified fund specialist (CFS), chartered financial consultant (ChFC), chartered financial analyst (CFA), chartered life underwriter (CLU) and/or juris doctor (JD), and carry their Series 7, 24, 51, 63, 65, 66 and insurance licenses.
4. Proactive communications. How frequently do you communicate with your clients? Do you proactively send out rationale for buy/sell decisions?
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Your advisor should focus on delivering proactive and transparent communications to clients. For example, our firm sends out trade notifications that explain every buy and sell decision. In addition, we send out a weekly market commentary, a monthly investment outlook and a quarterly market outlook video, along with several education videos, strategy fact sheets, industry updates, insightful statistics, informational whitepapers and more.
Making these types of resources available to clients will help educate investors and give them the information needed to know that we are actively monitoring their accounts.