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Every figure on this page was read from the document named beside it on 27 August 2026. Two of the documents cited refuse an automated read, and each of those says so beside its citation and names what was read instead. The page source carries the classification of each entry, the searches that stand behind the entries reporting an absence, and the figures held out of the page because they have not yet been read back against a primary document. Christoph signs off as licensee.
This page sets out the current state of published knowledge on the measurement of what advisers do for clients, the behaviour of investors in market falls, the drawdown behaviour of retirees, and the part of lifetime wealth that sits in future earnings. Covered are what was measured, the source, and limitations of that source. This is background information and separate to the In Your Interest Investment Tools, who source their numbers as outlined in this methods page.
The information is as of 27 August 2026. Where a figure comes from a working paper rather than the journal version, the entry says so.
In the Wealth and Assets Survey, which the Office for National Statistics runs across Great Britain, the people who reported receiving advice were, on average, older, £274,000 wealthier, 15% more likely to hold a degree and 15% more likely to be married than the people who did not, and were more likely to receive lump sum payments both before and after taking advice. A comparison of the two groups therefore measures the difference between the groups as well as anything advice did.
Source Bridging the advice gap: estimating the relationship between financial advice and wealth, Financial Conduct Authority Research Note, 30 June 2025, key findings and section 4.
These figures come from one survey, covering Great Britain, weighted to the population and read from the 2014 to 2016 wave. They compare people who reported receiving advice in the previous two years with people who reported none.
A systematic review searches for every study on a question by a stated method and reports what that body of work contains. One such review took the value of personal financial advice as its question. It screened peer-reviewed journals and grey literature, meaning working papers, theses, government reports and material published by professional bodies and firms, and worked from a final sample of 286 records. It reports that 80% of the sampled literature treats value as the financial benefits of advice, that just 16% of studies examine the long-term financial value of advice through client financial records, and that "few studies include matched-pair samples or account for potential selection bias from those who seek advice, which calls into question the robustness of these results". A matched-pair sample sets one or more advised persons beside one or more unadvised persons chosen to resemble them on the characteristics the data records.
Source MacDonald, Loy, Brimble and Wildman, "The value of personal professional financial advice to clients: A systematic quantitative literature review", Accounting & Finance, 2023, sections 2.2, 2.3 and 3.7 and Table 1. The authors record the support of AMP Financial Services Ltd and Griffith University.
The searches closed in January 2021, so nothing published after that date is in the sample. Of the 286 records, 170 are peer-reviewed journal articles and the rest are the grey literature; 134 come from North America, 99 from Europe and 35 from Australia and New Zealand.
The same note follows the same people over five survey waves from 2010 to 2020 and compares the change in wealth of those who took advice with the change for those who did not, adjusting for the characteristics the survey records. Two years after advice, wealth was 10.2% higher among those who received it, and that is the only one of the post-advice estimates whose confidence interval, the range of percentage outcomes that are plausible, excludes zero and the result may therefore be reported as being statistically significant. The later estimates stay positive, but the reasonably possible range of outcomes (the confidence interval) widens, and the measured outcome falls to 1.6% at eight years. The results are consistent with advice being associated with a short-term boost in wealth but the results are too imprecise to draw a conclusion if there is a long-term wealth effect. When the people who received a lump sum, such as an inheritance, a gift or a one-off pension payment, are excluded, the note reports the relationship as not clearly different from zero. The authors write that they advise caution in interpreting the magnitudes or applying them to other settings.
Source Financial Conduct Authority Research Note, 30 June 2025, key findings, section 6, and Annexes 1 and 3 for the sample counts, the spread of wealth changes and the confidence intervals.
Advice is recorded in that survey as a question about the last two years, so the exposure mixes a first appointment with a long relationship. The survey covers Great Britain.
The later estimates are imprecise, and the reason is how widely the outcome varies rather than how many people were counted: the smallest difference a comparison can detect depends on both. The comparison sets 540 people who took advice against 1,778 who did not. Between survey waves the median person who took no advice saw wealth change by 7.6%, while the mean change was 728% and in the most extreme case wealth rose by more than 1,000,000%. Against a spread that wide, the standard error on the estimate rises from 2.6 percentage points at two years to 7.5 points at eight, so the 95% confidence interval at eight years runs from -16.5% to +19.7%. A true gain of ten per cent at eight years would sit inside that interval and could not be told apart from no gain at all. The note's own summary is that variable results and relatively small sample sizes limit its statistical power.
The note reports a difference that remains after adjusting for the characteristics the survey measured, among them age, wealth, education and marital status. Adjusting can remove only the differences that were measured, and there could be important factors, referred to in statistics as confounders, that were not measured. A hypothetical example would be a character trait that both seeks advice more than the general population and that same trait is also instrumental in acquiring wealth. Hence, no causality was proven, only a more-likely-than-not association that is very likely in the first two years.
Bodie, Treussard and Willen put the present value of future earnings beside financial wealth and write that "for most households, human wealth dwarfs financial wealth". Their Table 1, computed from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, gives a male college graduate's human wealth as 47.4 times current income at age 25 and 25.9 times at age 35, and the multiple falls with age at every education level. Whether those earnings become financial wealth is a separate question. Venti and Wise took 3,992 households from the United States Health and Retirement Study, all of them aged 51 to 61, ranked them by lifetime earnings using their Social Security earnings records, and measured what each had accumulated by that age. Their wealth measure is everything the household holds apart from its Social Security entitlement: financial assets, retirement accounts, employer pension entitlements, home equity net of the mortgage, vehicles, business equity and other real estate. On that measure, households in the sixth decile of lifetime earnings had median wealth of $144,188 and a tenth of them held less than $30,000; in the ninth decile the median was $305,536 and a tenth held less than $100,000.
Those two figures for the sixth decile describe one group of households, not two. A decile is a tenth of the sample, taken in order of the quantity it is ranked on, so every household in the sixth decile of lifetime earnings earned a similar amount over a working life: it is the tenth of households whose lifetime earnings sat just above the middle of the whole sample. Within that one group of similar earners, the household in the middle had accumulated $144,188 by the ages of 51 to 61, while the tenth of the group at the bottom had accumulated less than $30,000. So the middle household ended with at least 4.8 times the wealth of its own earnings peers in the bottom tenth, and the ninth decile shows the same shape at a higher level of pay. Said a third way: households paid much the same over a working life arrived at retirement in very different places, and saving is what the paper is left with as the explanation. Its conclusion is that most of the spread in wealth at retirement comes from some families choosing to save while similarly placed families choose to spend, and it reports that the spread is not accounted for by adverse financial events such as poor health, or by inheritances. The paper summarises the spread within each decile as the ratio of the 90th percentile to the 10th: thirty-five times in the fifth decile of lifetime earnings, then 16, 19, 12, 10 and 9 times in the sixth through the tenth.
Sources Bodie, Treussard and Willen, "The Theory of Life-Cycle Saving and Investing", Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Public Policy Discussion Paper 07-3, 2007, Table 1; Venti and Wise, "Choice, Chance, and Wealth Dispersion at Retirement", in Aging Issues in the United States and Japan, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Both are United States samples, and the human wealth figures are present values computed from a model of earnings rather than amounts anybody holds. The dollar amounts are as the households reported them in the survey's first wave, in 1992.
The 90th to 10th percentile ratios have a 10th percentile underneath them, and that number is small. On a narrower measure they would not work at all: for personal financial assets by themselves, leaving out retirement accounts, the same paper reports the 10th percentile as negative or close to zero in every lifetime earnings decile. A ratio always depends on the number it is divided by, and the smaller that number is the further the ratio swings when it moves. The dollar amounts above have no number underneath them at all: a median and a bottom-tenth level are amounts of money, so nothing at the bottom of the distribution can swing them.
Read together the two papers support a narrow sentence: future earnings are the larger part of lifetime resources for most working-age households, and a household with high earnings that saves little can still arrive at retirement with very little financial wealth.
Experimental accounts for Australia, built on lifetime labour income for the working-age population aged 18 to 65, put the stock of human capital in 2001 at about $7.0 trillion in 2001 dollars. Treasury's household wealth table gives household net worth at June 2001 as $2,666.1 billion. The first is 2.6 times the second. The same paper records why the comparison stops there: official national accounts confine capital stocks to physical capital, and human capital is left out of them by convention.
Sources Wei, "Measuring Human Capital for Australia: Issues and Measures", paper for the 30th General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, August 2008, Table 2 and section 1; the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) published the same accounts as Research Paper 1351.0.55.023, February 2008, described there as an experimental accumulation account. Household net worth from "Australian household net worth", Goldbloom and Craston, the Australian Treasury, Table 1.
The two totals are built on different definitions. The human capital stock is a present value of expected lifetime labour income, computed at a real discount rate of 5% and real income growth of 1.75%, the rates Treasury used in its own income projections of 2002; household net worth is assets less liabilities at market value. So 2.6 is the ratio of two published totals rather than a measured multiple of one quantity by another. Both are national totals for one date. There is no Australian series that sets a household's future earnings beside its financial assets by age.
The Retirement Income Review reports that more than half of retirees older than 65 draw down at the minimum rate, citing Rice Warner, and that the median withdrawal for all ages is just above the minimum. Each year a person must withdraw a set percentage of their superannuation, rising with age, to keep the earnings tax exemption; that percentage is the minimum. The Review's own summary states that prescribed minimum drawdown rates anchor behaviour and reinforce a tendency to conserve superannuation savings, and that without a change in drawdown behaviour bequests from superannuation will grow. Two of the measurements it reproduces are adjusted for inflation and point the same way: household net financial wealth outside the family home grows through retirement, apart from a decline around the global financial crisis, and average superannuation balances by age cohort, in 2017 dollars, rise rather than fall across 2013 to 2017. The Department of Social Services' analysis of its payment data shows no significant change in age pensioners' assessable assets, the assets counted by the Age Pension means test, in the five years before death, and the Review reports that the taper on that test, the rate at which the pension is reduced as those assets rise, does not appear to have a strong effect on whether people draw down. Around 10% of single age pensioners consumed 90% of their assets over an eight-year period.
Source Retirement Income Review Final Report, chapter 5A, Cohesion, the Australian Treasury, released 20 November 2020, printed report pages 415, 432, 433, 434 and 445. The Review's publication page carries the complete report. The eight-year figure is the Review's, drawn from Asher, Meyricke, Thorp and Wu (2017), who used a random sample of Department of Social Services payment data from 1999 to 2007. The two inflation-adjusted charts are reproduced by the Review from Daley and others (2018), for net financial wealth, and Polidano and others (2020), for superannuation balances by age cohort.
The Review notes the exception in the same passage: the majority of people with low balances withdraw more than the minimum. The two figures most often quoted for what retirees leave behind are set out in item 7 of the next section, with what each of them covers and what the Review does and does not say about how they were measured.
United States employees who save through a workplace retirement plan, the 401(k), either choose their own investments from the plan's menu, which the researchers call self-directed, or hand the whole portfolio over, which they call delegated. Delegation takes two forms in these records. A target date fund holds one mix of shares and bonds for everybody retiring around a given year and shifts that mix towards bonds as the year approaches. A managed account builds a portfolio around the individual, using their salary, savings rate, other retirement assets and stated tolerance for risk. In the first quarter of 2020, across the 617,375 accounts the study covers, all held at one plan administrator, 2.1% of participants invested in target date funds made any change to their portfolios, against 16.6% of participants who were not delegated, and the rate was lower still among participants placed into managed accounts by default. Vanguard reported the same pattern in its own plans over the same period: fewer than 2% of target date fund investors traded, a rate five times lower than other Vanguard investors, and 5.3% of all participants in defined contribution plans, where each member's balance is what was contributed plus investment returns, traded between January and April 2020. Vanguard attributes the difference to automatic plan features and professionally managed allocations.
Sources Blanchett, Finke and Reuter, "Portfolio Delegation and 401(k) Plan Participant Responses to COVID-19", National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 27438, June 2020, abstract and section 2; Vanguard, news release of 10 June 2020, which summarises How America Saves 2020: An Update.
Both are administrative records of employer plans rather than randomised comparisons, and who holds a target date fund is a choice, which the authors discuss. The first document is a working paper, circulated before peer review. One of its authors works for the firm whose services the plan administrator uses, which the paper discloses, and the second document is published by a fund manager about its own participants. Neither record identifies whether a participant had an adviser.
Three experiments with Australian superannuation members aged 55 to 67, with 1,603 participants in total, asked each person to choose withdrawals from a hypothetical account of A$350,000 over ten steps from age 67 to age 91. At the first step the required minimum withdrawal was A$17,500, and people could add to it in set amounts. What people were shown before choosing changed what they chose. Shown a projection of the income the balance could provide, they withdrew a little more than the minimum. Shown a single dollar figure for annual retirement income, they moved much further. At the first step, people shown the Age Pension of A$24,550 a year chose on average A$25,000, the nearest amount the experiment allowed, and people shown the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia's comfortable-retirement budget of A$45,239 a year for a home-owning couple chose on average A$32,500. The third experiment removed the labels saying where each figure came from, and the choices moved the same way, so it was the dollar amounts and not their source that did the work.
Source Newell, Bateman, Dobrescu, Embrey, Nian and Thorp, "Undefined benefit: Projections and anchors as guides to retirement decumulation", working paper of 5 March 2025, sections 3 to 5. The paper is published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance; the figures here were read from the working paper, whose publisher answers an automated request.
The choices are hypothetical and the participants came from an online panel. The paper measures what people said they would withdraw, not what they withdrew and not how they felt. Participants in every condition, including the ones shown nothing, withdrew above the minimum, so part of what the experiments record is the effect of being asked to review the decision at all. Projections of future wealth, as distinct from future income, moved the choices not at all. Its authors write that the tools they tested have the potential to improve wellbeing in retirement, but did not measure wellbeing.
At one large Swiss retail bank, every trade could be classified as advised or made by the client independently, which allows a comparison inside the same person's account. Over the year after each purchase, purchases made after advice returned 3.0 percentage points less than the same client's own purchases, once each trade is measured against what a stock of its kind would have been expected to earn rather than against zero. That allowance is what a reader has to follow, and it works like this. A stock whose price has been moving half as far again as the Swiss market, up and down, is expected to earn half as much again as that market earned; that expected amount is subtracted from what the trade actually returned, and the remainder is what gets compared. So a purchase is not credited with a rise that the market delivered to every holder of a stock like it. Against a wider expectation, which allows as well for how far the stock moves with the world market and for whether it is a large or a small company, a cheap or an expensive one measured against its book value, and one whose price has been rising or falling over recent months, the shortfall is 1.7 points. Against no expectation at all, on the returns as they came in, advised purchases are 1.1 points behind and that difference cannot be told apart from no difference. The authors report that advisers reduced some of the behavioural biases the clients showed, and that the reduction did not offset the performance difference.
Source Hoechle, Ruenzi, Schaub and Schmid, "The Impact of Financial Advice on Trade Performance and Behavioral Biases", Working Papers on Finance No. 2014/19, Swiss Institute of Banking and Finance, version of 8 December 2015, abstract, section 3.2 and Table IV for the within-person comparison, and section 4 for the behavioural biases. The paper is published in the Review of Finance, 2017; the figures here were read from the working paper.
One bank, in one country, in one channel, and the outcome is the performance of individual share trades rather than a household's wealth. Comparing a client with themselves removes the question of who chooses to take advice, and it measures share trades and nothing else an adviser does for a client.
On records covering Canadian mutual fund dealers and their clients, advisers moved clients towards more risk, and the risk each client ended up with was tailored to that client only a little. The quantity measured is the risky share, the proportion of the portfolio held in growth assets rather than in cash and fixed interest. Thirty-three measured characteristics of a client, among them age, gender, income, wealth, home ownership, occupation, investment horizon and the answers given on a risk questionnaire, together explain 13% of the differences in risky share between clients. Adding one indicator for each adviser, and nothing else, raises that to 32%: which adviser a client happens to have predicts their risk level better than everything the dealer knows about them.
How large that effect is can be read off the paper's own comparison. Moving from an adviser at the 25th percentile of the adviser distribution to one at the 75th goes with a 20 percentage point increase in growth assets. So take two clients of the same age and income who give the same answers to the risk questionnaire, one with an adviser at the 25th percentile and one with an adviser at the 75th: the model puts them 20 percentage points apart in the share of the portfolio held in growth assets. For scale, the paper reports its least risk-tolerant clients holding 40% in growth assets on average and its most risk-tolerant holding 80%, so the adviser difference is half of that whole span, and the paper predicts the same 20 point gap for a single client whose stated risk tolerance is three levels higher, from "low to moderate" up to "high". An adviser's own portfolio is among the strongest predictors of the client's. The average client paid more than 2.7% a year in fees. A later paper on Canadian advisers and their clients reports the advisers' own net returns at about 3% a year, and finds that the advisers' own portfolios fell short of passive benchmarks by as much as their clients' did. Those advisers went on holding portfolios of that kind after they left the industry, which is the comparison the authors use to separate belief from incentive.
Sources Foerster, Linnainmaa, Melzer and Previtero, "Retail Financial Advice: Does One Size Fit All?", NBER Working Paper 20712, November 2014, abstract and sections 3.2 and 3.3, published in the Journal of Finance, 2017; Linnainmaa, Melzer and Previtero, "The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors", Journal of Finance 76(2), 2021, abstract.
The working paper discloses that two of its authors received financial support from Canadian financial firms. The fee figure is the working paper's; the journal version reports a slightly lower average. The authors give two readings of the adviser indicators: advisers build similar portfolios for their clients, or clients who choose the same adviser resemble each other in ways the data does not record. Their switcher analysis, which follows clients who change advisers, supports the first reading over the second.
In one United States university retirement plan, brokers were available to new participants and then were not, which allows the portfolios of broker clients to be compared with matched portfolios of the plan's target date funds. Broker clients earned lower returns than the matched target date portfolios after allowing for the market risk each portfolio carried, and less return for each unit of variability in it, while carrying similar risk, and paid average annual broker fees of 0.90%. The same paper reports a comparison that runs the opposite way in the period before the target date funds existed: participants with a high predicted demand for advice who went through a broker were much less likely to hold nothing but a money market fund, a fund holding only short-term deposits and similar instruments.
Source Chalmers and Reuter, "Is Conflicted Investment Advice Better than No Advice?", working paper of December 2018, abstract, published in the Journal of Financial Economics, 2020.
One plan, one set of members, and a commission-paid channel. What the broker clients are measured against is the plan's default target date fund, which in this case shows that holding a target date fund is, on average, more beneficial for the portfolio than engaging a broker.
In 2011 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) ran a shadow-shopping study of retirement advice: real consumers obtained advice, and ASIC's analysts then graded each piece of advice against a written template, with a third analyst or an expert reference group settling disagreements. Of the 64 advice examples, 58% were graded adequate, 39% poor, and two examples, which is 3%, good. The same participants were then asked what they thought. Fifty-five of the 64, which is 86%, rated the advice they had received as good quality; six rated it neither good nor poor and three rated it poor. Fifty-two, which is 81%, said they trusted the advice a lot, and a further nine trusted it a little. ASIC's own sentence about the two sets of ratings is that "the absence of any variation in adviser and advice satisfaction between those who received good quality advice and those who received poor quality advice suggests that many people have difficulty in objectively assessing the quality of advice they receive".
Source ASIC, Report 279, "Shadow shopping study of retirement advice", March 2012, executive summary paragraphs 18 and 22 to 23 and Section E, Tables 9 and 10, read from ASIC's own download address on 31 August 2026.
The finding is an absence of variation rather than a measurement of one, and an absence is only as firm as the numbers behind it. The study covers 64 pieces of retirement advice obtained in 2011, and only three participants rated their advice poor, so a difference in satisfaction between the graded groups would have had to be large for a study this size to show it. ASIC's grades are the judgements of its own analysts against its own template, and the study measures the quality of the advice as ASIC assessed it rather than what happened to anyone's money afterwards.
The shares of Australian funds that trailed their index over one, ten and fifteen years, and the count of top-quarter funds that stayed among the top quarter in their investment performance, are set out with their editions and their limits on the active and passive page.
Source Active and passive, in this section.
Two measures of that gap are in circulation, one published annually as a report and one published by Morningstar, and they are computed differently. Both are set out on the active and passive page, with the published critiques of the first and what each measure covers.
Source Active and passive, in this section.
No published study separates the effect of Australian financial advice from the characteristics of the people who seek it, measured on household outcomes. The systematic review above reaches the same conclusion about the literature it sampled, and this practice's search of 17 August 2026, which covered Australia first and then the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, found no such study for Australia and none for fee-for-service advice in any jurisdiction. The question is open rather than answered in either direction, and the questions section of this page sets out what answering it would take.
Sources MacDonald, Loy, Brimble and Wildman, Accounting & Finance, 2023, for its own conclusion about matched-pair samples and selection. That no Australian or fee-for-service study of this kind was found is this practice's own search, of 17 August 2026, and not a published finding.
An absence found by searching is evidence about the literature, and it changes when a study is published. The searches behind this page ran in August 2026.
The eleven statements below come up in conversations about advice, saving and investor behaviour. Each one is set out with what a search of the published record finds and where that search looked. One of them is treated on the active and passive page and carries a line and a link here.
The four questions below are open, and each one names what an answer would take and what stands in the way. In the author's assessment the first and the third are subjects at doctorate level: each needs client records assembled and grouped under advisers before the analysis can begin, and the analysis itself is years of work. The second is a design specification a panel operator could adopt, and the fourth is a single table an existing household panel could report.
The published work on advice measures the average adviser. A different question asks how much of the difference between clients' outcomes belongs to the individual practitioner they happen to see. Medicine has an answer of that shape. Two systematic reviews by the author of the calculator, Dr Christoph Schnelle, one for surgeons and one for all other doctors, together took 77 unique cohort studies, which follow a defined group of patients forward over time; five of the studies appeared in both reviews. For scale, the surgeons' review screened 10,239 records after removing duplicates, retrieved 471 full texts, and kept 55 studies, one of which a reviewer added from outside the search. The review of doctors other than surgeons covered 36,239 doctors, ten specialties and sixty outcomes, seventeen of them distinct, found no randomised trials, and found the share of the differences in patients' physical outcomes attributable to the individual doctor, after everything known about the patients, the doctors and the hospitals had been accounted for, ranging from 0 to 33%, with a mean of 3.9%. The review of surgeons, which also found three randomised trials, covered at least 52,436 surgeons and 102 outcomes, 33 of them distinct, and found the equivalent share ranging from 0 to 47%, with a median of 4.0%; sixteen of its studies reported individual surgeons whose results, with the statistical uncertainty around them, sat wholly above or wholly below the average performance. No study reporting the equivalent share for the clients of financial advisers was found. The nearest published figures are the adviser indicators in the Canadian records above, which explain more of the differences in portfolio risk than the full set of client characteristics; but what a portfolio holds is not an outcome for the client. The open question is what that share is for a household outcome, and the review method that answers it in another field needs studies that group clients under advisers, which is the constraint the next three questions address.
Sources Schnelle, Clark, Mascord and Jones, "Is There a Doctors' Effect on Patients' Physical Health, Beyond the Intervention and All Known Factors? A Systematic Review" and "Is There a Surgeons' Effect on Patients' Physical Health, Beyond the Intervention, That Requires Further Investigation? A Systematic Review", both Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management, 2022, which this site's author carried out as doctoral research. The count of 77 unique studies is a count across the two reviews' inclusion lists, with the five studies both reviews included counted once. Foerster, Linnainmaa, Melzer and Previtero, NBER Working Paper 20712, 2014, for the adviser indicators.
The doctors' review describes the reporting across its studies as highly diverse, and the surgeons' review describes its findings as highly variable by outcome and type of surgery, which is why neither presents a pooled figure. The mean of 3.9% and the median of 4.0% should not be read as the answer for any one specialty: the same reviews find outcomes where the practitioner accounts for nothing at all and outcomes where the practitioner accounts for a third or nearly half. Carrying the method across to financial advice is a proposal about design, and it establishes nothing about advisers on its own but is a clear example of professionals making a substantial difference to their clients.
Household panels record whether advice was received, usually within a fixed window, which makes a first appointment and a twenty-year relationship the same answer. Three additions would change what a panel can measure. Recording whether an ongoing adviser relationship exists, and for how long, separates the two. Recording which strategy was followed, where a respondent can say, allows the effect of the strategy to be told apart from the effect of the relationship. Recording windfalls, and holding them out, is the control the regulator's own note shows to matter: its relationship between advice and wealth was not clearly different from zero once people who received a lump sum were excluded. The decade-long study now running in the United States illustrates the other half of the constraint: its own description names a representative sample of American households, compared by whether they work with a certified financial planner, another professional or nobody, which records the kind of adviser and not which adviser.
Sources Financial Conduct Authority Research Note, 30 June 2025, robustness checks; the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards (CFP Board), Financial Planning Longitudinal Study, for the study's own description of its sample.
The first open question above asked how much of the difference between clients' outcomes belongs to the individual adviser. Answering that question in Australia needs two things: client records grouped by adviser, and a public list of advisers to group them against. The public list of advisers exists: the Financial Advisers Register is a public record of the advisers authorised to provide personal advice to retail clients, maintained by ASIC and published on its Moneysmart site. The client records grouped by adviser sit with the platform administrators, who hold the account records. Three questions would have to be settled before any of it could run: whether the administrators would supply client records grouped by adviser, under what privacy arrangement, and which outcome would be measured, since a platform record shows holdings and transactions rather than a household's circumstances.
Source ASIC, Financial Advisers Register, for what the register is and who is on it.
Whether the account records carry a usable adviser identifier is a question for the administrators and is not established here. A study built that way would compare advisers with each other, which is a different question from comparing advised households with unadvised ones. It would not tell a client anything about one named adviser either: separating one practitioner from another needs many more observations of that practitioner than a design of this kind collects.
A study of middle-aged Australian women asked a question of the same shape. Using five surveys of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health between 1998 and 2010, covering 4,840 women born between 1946 and 1951, it reported that between consecutive surveys 41% to 46% did not change their physical activity level, 24% to 30% decreased it and 24% to 31% increased it, and that those proportions were much the same in the interval containing a new diagnosis of chronic disease as in any other interval. The equivalent table has not been reported for money: no study was found giving the share of households whose saving or portfolio behaviour improved, held steady and worsened around a financial event, on any major household panel. If the share that improves and the share that gets worse are close to equal, then individual households can be moving a long way while the population average moves very little, and an average effect of nearly zero would not mean that nothing happened to anybody.
Source Dontje, Krijnen, de Greef, Peeters, Stolk, van der Schans and Brown, "Effect of diagnosis with a chronic disease on physical activity behavior in middle-aged women", Preventive Medicine 83, 2016, pages 56 to 62. The publisher refuses an automated request, so the figures here were read from the published abstract as indexed on 27 August 2026 by Europe PMC, the European index of life-science literature, and the entry states only what that abstract states. That the equivalent table has not been built for money is this practice's own search, of 17 August 2026.
This page shows that there is little published, or perhaps even known, evidence on advisers making a difference, and some of the evidence shows that advisers financially harm clients, though that same example, under "What advisers did to allocations, and what they held themselves" above, showed that the advisers make the same mistakes with their own investments.
I have been an adviser for 20 years and I have observed many wealth transformations for the better among my clients. About one percent have a very strong impulse to cause damage to their finances regardless of the advice they receive – no matter how many times I would explain the mechanism behind each scam they looked at, that small proportion of clients would quickly come back with a new scam they had found on the internet. The other 99% do not have that tendency, and almost all of them take a very strong interest in getting their finances sorted.
There are many different types of advisers and of advice. A hierarchy of advice could be written this way, ranging from the worst to the best:
Differences in quality among advisers can, in my experience, be very large, and research that does not take account of this variation, treating advisers as being more or less the same, is unlikely to lead to a meaningful result. The first research question should therefore be what makes a good or exceptional adviser, looking for objective criteria of what defines the differences among advisers. Then the effect of advice can be measured with practitioner quality taken into account.
A good adviser needs to be good with people and able to understand people, the deeper the better, so communication skills are critical. An adviser needs to have a good heart and deep respect for clients and that they have the unfettered right to make their choices and therefore offers but does not impose.
A good adviser also needs substantial technical knowledge and skills. Experience, whether advice experience or life experience, can make a very big difference, as lived experience provides an authority that knowledge alone does not have.
There are very large differences in quality between individual lawyers, accountants and doctors. It is the same with financial advisers. Dealing with a bad professional can be very harmful. Meeting an average professional is useful. Meeting a brilliant professional is a joy and can be transformative.
I have built these In Your Interest Investment Tools with copious AI coding and other support, but I do not use AI in communicating with clients unless that is specifically flagged, for example when providing investment research results. The text on the Investment Tools is a collaboration between the author and the AI.
Built by In Your Interest Financial Planning. In Your Interest Financial Planning Pty Ltd, ABN 28 094 300 464 is Authorised Rep. No 308161 of Fiduciary Duty Advisers Pty Ltd AFSL No 527434. Nothing on this page is advice to you or to your clients, and nothing on it is a recommendation of any product, any strategy or any adviser. Corrections are welcome and wanted – contact us.