When you boil it down, stock brokers and financial advisors are in sales. They make money by selling stuff, either on a trade or a specific product or a service. Customers are hard to come by, and the last thing you want to do, apparently, is tell them what they don't want to hear, no matter how much they ought to hear it. Brokers aren't parents. So should we be surprised by a recent study by Harvard professors, according to Fortune, that most financial advisors are yes-men when it comes to prospective clients?

This conclusion was built on 300 interviews by advisors with actors pretending to be investors, who went in with specific portfolios and asked for advice. Most of the advice conformed to their original biases. In some cases, this might be wrong, such as the case of a customer holding too much stock in their company. But in other cases, this is not shocking. All brokers try to work with your risk tolerance levels. Getting the business is the top priority after all. You need to flexible.

A Employee Benefit Research Institute survey found recently that two-thirds of those interested in financial planners were likely to implement advice only if it conformed to their own ideas. The broader issue in my mind is fiduciary responsibility, and whether the doctrine should be extended to the industry. We'll hear more about that. 

For more:
- here's the Fortune article

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