Talk:Investment advisor

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The parentheses in the following quote is not closed, and if it were closed the sentence without parentheses would read "Stockbrokers" and would have nested parentheses... bad form:

"Stock brokers (known as "registered representatives" under U.S. federal law and licensed in the various states are not necessarily (and normally are not) registered investment advisors."

No matter where you close the parentheses I can't figure out exactly what is intended. 21:38, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Proposed move

I propose to move the article from investment advisor to investment adviser.

Why you might ask? - Well, a quick survey of UK, US Australian and South African websites nearly all use the 'er rather than 'or.

Also the word derives from 'advice' which definately has an 'e' not an 'o'.

I presume in the US the terms are interchangeable therefore it shouldn't cause any great problems. The US SEC - the official regulator - uses 'adviser' [1]. -- Simon West 23:04, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

A quick Google search returns 148,000,000 hits for "advisor" and only 46,000,000 for "adviser". They are about tied for "investment advisor" versus "investment adviser", but the former still gets more hits. The move seems a bit hasty, given that your post is from only 2 days ago, and I don't think it was necessary, given that "advisor" is a correct spelling, and appears to be the more common one at that. - Gauge 02:52, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

For what it's worth (and maybe that's not much), the official name of one applicable law in the United States is the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 -- i.e., "adviser" as opposed to "advisor." Obviously, either spelling is otherwise correct (at least in American English). Famspear 04:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Conflicts of interest

There should be something about conflicts of interest - e.g. where an advisor gets a financial reward for signing customers up to a particular managed fund. Due to negative publicity, I think in Australia it's become more standard (and expected) now for advisors to make some kind of acknowledgement of this when making recommendations. (Can't think of the word - not disclaimer...). Of course, this doesn't mean that are no longer ethical problems. --Singkong2005 01:46, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

In the UK, commission disclosure (which is probably the word you trying to think of) is mandatory. The commison paid on UTs and OEICs is pretty standard at 3% + 0.5%pa but other investments vary. Advisers have been criticised for recomending Endowments, which pay more commision but are less flexible and tax efficient investments, over more appropriate investments which pay less commission. Disclosure helps but abuse still goes on. In theory, customers who are inappropriately advised can claim for compensation but bad advice is almost impossible to prove when it is given verbally. --DanielRigal 10:05, 30 April 2006 (UTC)