I manage mine myself and I earn a great return because I’ve spent the hours spitting out financial models. Most people will not do anything beyond looking at fact sheets and snap shots or taking it on faith that third party raters are correct – like morningstar. For equity, I spent 100s of hours learning how to derive enterprise value, developing my own growth rates, calculating free cash flows (most analysts will use EBITDA out of laziness and sometimes the small differences in numbers are a huge error), et….I project my models out 5 years and back into a stock price for those years. If they are higher than what the stock is going at now then I take a long positions, if not, I short the stock.
I’m young so I have a long time horizon and don’t really know much about day trading so I do long term calculations. Most financial planners can offer decent returns on managed accounts, but I would not give me money to an advisor unless they had a CFA, many have CFPs, which is all right, but if you want returns, you want a CFA.
The other thing I am trying to learn in depth is debt/derivative investing, and I don’t just mean finding a bond/cd/leasing note/options and investing money in it. I mean full on learning how to maximize durability, utilize coupon stripping, using a black scholes model how to properly hedge using options/forex. Debt investors are the fucking smartest people on the planet as far as finance goes, period.
I guess in short, if you want to do it yourself, don’t half ass it – it’s not something that can be half assed. If you’re going to slack on educating yourself and be lazy about it, get an advisor.
*I wasn’t directing my comments at you, just in general : ]