| There are three ways I built my net worth in the stock market over the past 40 years: indexing, trading, and buying-and-holding. The three strategies are not mutually exclusive. However, a high-priced advisor generally sinks them all. For starters, they frown on index funds as "too vanilla." Not because they underperform - history shows that not one out of 10 active managers can beat their unmanaged benchmark over a decade or more - but because they don't offer advisors an opportunity to justify their fees. That's why they put their clients in actively managed funds. (And when the poor performance becomes too great to ignore, they justify their fees again by moving you into something else.) Trading stocks regularly through full-commission brokers is also destined to fail. Even if they take only a half a percent per trade - and most charge a lot more - over a year of active trading they will eat up most (if not all) of your return. Of course, most advisors are fee-based now. But even that has pitfalls. For example, I've bought and held several stocks, not just for years but decades. The most successful of these have been Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX). Both are worth more than 1,000 times what I paid for them. If I had bought them on the recommendation of a commission-based broker, they'd have been incentivized to recommend selling them, especially after they doubled or tripled. (Which means I would have missed out on the next 100,000% or so of upside.) Yet it also wouldn't have worked out well for me if I'd continued to hold them in a fee-based account. For example, even if the advisor charged a fee as low as 0.5% annually, I would have had to pay $10,000 a year to hold these two stocks once they reached a value of a million dollars each. Paying $10,000 a year to sit on the same stocks year after year makes no sense. Advisors - who are not stupid - know this, of course. They would recommend that I sell them - at once or in pieces - to (again) justify their fees. That's why virtually no one with one of these accounts has a stock that is up several-fold. Getting out and losing all the future appreciation is detrimental to the shareholder. But it's a benefit to the account manager, who at least looks like he's earning his fees. In short, Matson is wrong. Most people are fully capable - spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually - of managing a diversified portfolio. Sure, there is a risk that you could do something regrettable along the way. But at least you're not incentivized to do it. Good investing, Alex | 
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