Thus far that hasn’t been a problem for me.
As long as the market keeps climbing…
In a rising market everyone is a genius. Even me. 
To respond seriously - obviously we should also be happy when we drop less than the average investor does in a losing market - so what is a reasonable benchmark to judge our overall performance against? Not the S&P … needs some risk measure?
Trying for a serious answer. Albeit one I’m distilling right here and now from lots of reading. So maybe iffy as a conclusion, but perhaps a decent first draft for more discussion.
My take is risk level is (or ought to be) a higher order decision. We decide our risk goal, then adjust our portfolio to match that risk goal and accept the return that gives. Relying on long term averages to deliver the performance we wish for, and have some rational basis for expecting based on historical performance. Ideally. Unless we’re really unlucky.
If one is comfortable with the risk level inherent in a 100% stock-based portfolio, then yes, the S&P 500 is a suitable benchmark to measure your performance against.
At the opposing extreme, if one is comfortable only with a 100% long bond portfolio, then that index is the benchmark to compare yourself to.
Of course most everyone in this thread is somewhere in the middle in terms of their risk goal.
My own portfolio is about 75% equity, 20% corporate bonds, and 5% commodities & crypto. So if I wanted to assess my performance, I might blend 75% S&P 500, 20% a corporate bond index, make some fudge factor for my small holdings, and benchmark against that.
Hmm. I wonder if there is also some testing about how different allocations intended for different risk levels end up performing, on volatility measures, on performance in bear markets.
So for a person with a moderately but not all in high volatility/risk tolerance, how do/did different allocation approaches deliver on both total return and those volatility measures, meeting the risk level goals?
I personally get confused by the Sharpe measure stuff so keep it simple for me!
IMO the problem quickly becomes that trying to dice the data too finely fails because the past does not precisely predict the future.
How did this risk allocation work in that future situation quickly starts to sound like the jokey baseball stats: “He’s batting 0.345 against left handed pitching with jersey numbers ending in 7 in Thursday away games.” The math might be impeccable but the predictive power is minimal for sample size reasons.
I’m on my phone now & will return later tonight w some additional musings.
Yeah, the dangers of overfitting. And there have been some specific circumstances that may not repeat.
Still nice to look at our own scorecards and see how our individual approaches did relatively in a more holistic sense!
When I looked at Vanguard it was a half percent also? I could be misremembering. Tanstaafl.
To have an advisor who advises. If that’s what you mean yes. But to get a live person on the phone to request trades or withdrawals or to get tax stuff? I don’t have Vanguard but nothing extra for that.
What do you do if you don’t have any losses that will offset cap gains? Maybe I need to target losers a bit more. How is DJT stock doing? I guess it can’t really go down that much more. 
Actually, a capital loss can be used to offset ordinary income as well, not just capital gains.
That’s what I alluded to upthread. I own very few individual equities, and they are all worth somewhat more than what I paid for them.
That’s what I fail to understand how a money manager does tax loss harvesting to offset income. Are they going to buy an investment that they know will lose money quickly?
I was being tongue in cheek, but also serious. I have a lot of individual stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs, and apparently I pick well because I don’t ever seem to have huge losers. I have day to day losers, but not on the long haul. My “fun money” picks (I have roughly $500K I play with) are killing it right now, and they are most likely on the riskier side of things. It seems it is almost impossible these days to not make money.
There certainly are people with underwater positions. Who are decent targets for advsors since evidently they’re doing it wrong themselves.
But I tend to think of “tax loss harvesting” as just one of those trite but largely obsolete phrases that gets trotted out because that’s what journalists do: string trite cliches together to get their desired word count.
In an era when most non-1%er folks’ assets are mostly in tax deferred accounts, and are also mostly in mutual funds and ETFs, And are mostly buy and hold investors, trotting that out as a key value add for advisors is 1960s talk. Next let’s talk about the commission savings from buying round lots.
I’m exaggerating a bit for effect. But only a bit. For the active trader of individual equities and to some degree MFs & ETFs, tax loss harvesting is a real thing. But those people already know how to do it & don’t need advisor handholding.
True. Up to a total of $3000 per year, with the rest carried forward to next year. Interestingly to me, that $3000 is one of the few tax code features that is the same for both single & married filing jointly.
Which, depending on your ordinary income and your capital losses, may make the limit effectively meaningless, or the limit may reduce the deduction’s value to a flea bite off the elephant.
OTOH, it can make a difference as well.
Case in point: For the past several years, I’ve done taxes for a good friend of mine. Years ago, he had to sell his house during the divorce proceedings and took a huge loss. But he’s been able to claim $3k in capital losses for many years. Since he now subsists on SS and his IRA draw, it makes a significant difference in his taxable income.
I realize that’s an outlier of an example, but it is certainly helping him out each year at tax time.
I was in a similar boat for awhile.
Due to some bad workmanship in my stock-picking, I generated a bunch of paper capital losses. Which I made real by exiting the bad positions before they got to be even worse positions. Ouch, but sometimes lessons hurt.
Then I got smart, switched to index funds and buy and hold just as the long bull got going. So no reason to sell anything, so no cap gains to offset the carried-forward losses. So I chipped away at that elephant $3K per year. While inflation was doing more damage than that to my remaining not yet deducted losses.
My point was that if you’ve got only, say, $2,500 in losses, the $3K limit is immaterial; you can deduct it all. And if you’ve got $300K in losses, being able to deduct 1% of your losses this year means that after just 100 years you’ll have used it all up.
There’s a comparatively narrow window in the middle where the limit matters, but isn’t so restrictive as to reduce the deduction to de minimis. Yes, $3K off your taxable income ought to save about $750 to $1K in taxes. Which is better than nothing. But how much nicer if you could offset, e.g. $30K per year?
It’s essentially an arbitrary limit set at a value that makes no sense given the scale of capital gains and losses upper-middle / lower-upper class folks can generate. And for folks farther down the food chain, the vast majority of them aren’t investors in the first place. The limit is right-sized for people who (mostly) don’t even play the game.
Certainly that describes me. Okay there may be more getting into taxable accounts over the next few years and especially as RMDs kick in (if I ever stop working.)
And I think it describes even a fair chunk of the 1%ers! At least the funds and buy and hold.
Yes according to Claude:
• General population: 27% of Americans are currently working with a financial advisor, with men more likely than women (32% vs. 22%), and usage rising sharply with education — 19% for those with some college vs. 45% for those with postgraduate degrees.
• Affluent ($250K+ investable): 60% of affluent investors use an advisor, compared to 39% of the general population who say they rely on one.
• $500K+ investable: A Logica Research/First Citizens Bank survey of 1,000 Americans with at least $500K in investable assets found that over 76% work with a financial advisor.
• Millionaires ($1M+): 74% of American millionaires — defined as having at least $1 million in investable assets — report having a financial advisor, according to the Northwestern Mutual 2025 Planning & Progress Study.
• Ultra-HNW ($10M+): Among ultra-high-net-worth individuals with more than $10 million in investable assets, 89% receive value-added advisory services from their primary provider.
And I am at a loss as to why? I almost feel like there has to be some value added that I am missing.
These 1 to 10 million people are typically paying 0.5 to 1% AUM surcharge on top of other costs, which for some comes to several tens of thousands of dollars and a percentage that can’t not be a meaningful drag on performance, every year and the vast majority, mainly very well educated, are choosing to do it. I am pretty sure that most of my professional peers have advisors. I am the relative outlier scoffing at it.
I get that money and being confident in living how they want to live, having concerns over legacy, even self worth for some, is tied up with the numbers in those accounts, so paying for reassurance that they are doing the best they can do and aren’t at risk beyond comfort level is important. And I still don’t get it!
I’m a bit leery of those numbers.
My broker is Fidelity. I can call them right now and arrange an appointment with “my” designated advisor, and we can talk generalities, or more if I want. No charge.
Do I have advisor for the purposes of their data? I would say I don’t use a PAID advisor, but not sure how the surveys are worded.
Agreed. The wording matters. And if it’s not written very carefully, the data gets real fuzzy when an unknowable fraction of respondents each read it in one of 3 or 4 plausible ways.
And now “robo-advisors” which provide advice & handholding for a comparative pittance.
This is also me. But when I asked Fidelity for a quote to manage my assets, it was about 1%, and they would take full control of my investments.
A reasonable critique but this still holds:
And I am very sure these are not the call the Fidelity line and talk to someone or a gratis 401K person. These are people they are paying, by way of AUM, and happy to be doing so. That Merril Lynch caller I am sure got lots of takers working our list. Merril Lynch has also been sponsoring a series of seminars for our docs too! On the list has been the opportunities of private equity investment opening up to them! No shock to most here I suspect that I decline the invitations.
My WAG is that in higher investable assets group those percentages are not people calling the free service line.