There may be times when you feel that your financial advisor is not giving you the advice that’s best for the situation, and so you wonder: Is your financial advisor working for you, or is he doing all this in his own interest? Read on and find out the difference.

To be sure the financial advisors come from different backgrounds, different knowledge and levels of experience. It is only understandable that they may have varied opinions regarding a particular financial dilemma, however, some of their advice can just be downright ugly, and here’s how you can tell whether or not you’re getting good advice.

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No one can predict the future with certainty, so you cannot really expect your financial advisor not to make mistakes. There is, however, a big difference between a mistake made based on sound judgment and analysis, and one made because of lack of knowledge and carelessness.

There are two common reasons why you’re getting bad investment advice:

• The advisor places his own interest before yours; and
• Your advisor lacks knowledge and fails to observe due diligence.

Bad advice can have both short term and long term consequences. But they all have the same effect overall: loss of money. So, as an investor, you should never fully trust your financial advisor. Yes it’s good to have someone to confide to once in a while, but remember, the final decision is still yours.

Almost anyone can call themselves a financial planner. All it needs is an understanding of the rules of finance, and some understanding as to where to apply them. But is that all? The Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Board of Standards has understood the importance of giving quality financial assistance to people, and have instituted the CFP Certificate.

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A CFP certificate that is conferred on a planner ensures that your Financial Planner has the skills that you expect of them, and also makes sure that they behave in a professional manner. In order to earn and maintain their certificate, those holding it must prove that they are keeping updated with the latest trends, and are pursuing various courses of educating themselves on a regular basis.

The Certificate also lays down Standards of Professional Conduct that the individual must employ in order to maintain their certification. There are over 37,000 CFP’s that you can choose from at the website given above. The Board provides for a complaint system in case one of it’s professionals does not live uptot the technical or ethical standards.

So set your mind at rest when you want to find a financial planner for yourself. Find one that is professionally certified and increase the chances of getting quality advice.

Those of you who have been following this column know that I recommend the use of Yodlee to track your finances. And they’re improving all the time. As you explore around, you come to see more and more of this software, and how it keeps track of your finances….for free!

This post shows you how to check your portfolio’s performance with Yodlee, and you can gave great fun customizing it. The first step is to add your account, provide them with your username and password (Don’t worry, your info is safe. Yodlee is the most secure thing you can find. Read their Data Security Guidelines).

Once you do this, Yodlee populates with the transactions, and keeps adding to it.

When you log in, go to ‘Portfolio Manager’. Immediately you can see the net change on the left as shown in the picture

This shows you (Surprise!) how much you have gained or lost in the near past. Yodlee is constantly improving their features, and are very helpful.

I have logged a request to customize the date range, and I’m sure they will come out with that soon.

When you go to ‘View Portfolio Chart’, you can see a comparison of your investment’s performance upto a year. Here too, they will probably be allowing us to track over several years, and this feature will be likely to be out in the next version.

You can also configure alerts to warn you or appraise you when and if your portfolio changes by whatever percentage that you specify. This is great for control freaks who like to have all their finances under their thumb. No surprises here. Yodlee updates it’s accounts once every few hours, so you’re not likely to miss anything. Enjoy!

It might be too early to tell, but it might seem that Dow’s technical picture is starting to gain some short momentum. A large gap at the Moving Average Convergence/Divergence is manifesting while as you can see, the momentum is starting to slow down. Is it a flag and penchant formation? Or a sideways movement manifestation? Let the market and the traders judge on how Industrial America is heading.

A majority of Japanese stocks incurred severe losses as they were being weighed down by trading companies and shipping lines, amidst declining commodity prices and cargo rates.

Companies, like Mitsubishi Corp. and Mitsui & Co. that get greater than one-half of their realized profit from commodities, sent trading companies grazing the bottom. Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Ltd. after having incurred huge losses led a decline by shipping lines.

“Some investors want to reduce their holdings of commodity-related stocks as volatility increases. I expect the stock market’s nauseating gyrations to continue,” according to said Hideo Arimura, who helps oversee US$26 billion at Mizuho Asset Management Co., Tokyo.

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The Topix index has been swinging, six times, between opposite ends of gains and losses. This has further resulted in ending down 2.98, or about 0.2 percent, to 1,376.69. This week, there has been 1.4 percent gauge lost, trimming a two-month rally by 22 percent up to May 16. The Nikkei 225 Stock Average increased by 33.74, or 0.2 percent, and closed at 14,012.20, and incurred a 1.5 percent loss.

Crude oil fell 1.8 percent, the largest losses ever incurred since April 30, to $130.81 per barrel yesterday. Gold, on the other hand, plunged 1.1 percent from a one-month high. Copper hit bottom this week.

Nowadays, it’s so easy for a person to know nothing about the stock markets, and still make good viable investments. Mutual funds and fund managers have taken almost the bogeyman out of investing.

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However, there are some brave souls who want to brave it alone. To battle the elements and storms of the stock market without a middle man to buffer them. These people spend hours doing their own research into companies, and hope that they will be able to spot those firms that will do well in the future.

When Google was still a private company, it’s employees could purchase shares at just $0.3 per share. Anyone who spent $10,000 on their shares at that time, would have made a profit of over a million dollars by now! It’s very clear why investors are willing to take this chance for the insane returns.

Inspired by people like Warren Buffet who have consistently beat the market for years together, they hope to do a better job picking and selecting their stocks than Mutual Fund managers, who charge you a fee for doing it. They try and do a ‘Fundamental Analysis’, which assumes that share prices as they exist can contain inaccuracies.

This differs from the basics of ‘Technical Analysis’ which assumes that all information is already present in the market, and ultimately, Fundamental Analysis is a waste of time. In future articles, we are going to explore more about fundamental analysis.

The Economic Value Added Metric (EVA) is a measure of how well a company is able to deliver returns over and above the cost of capital.

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We have already seen in an earlier post, a metric used to assess the position and pricing of a stock, namely the P/E Ratio. Among other things, the P/E ratio is not a static assessment of a stock, and depends heavily on the market assessment of the stock (The ‘P’).

The Economic Value Added Metric (EVA), is more objective that the P/E ratio, and was developed by Stern Stewart & Co. and is their registered trademark.

To find out the EVA, one needs to know the Net Operating Profit after Taxes (NOPAT), and the current cost of capital. EVA is then calculated as: NOPAT - (Cost of Capital) x Total Capital Invested. As you can see, if the company outperforms, the EVA is positive.

This metric is only used for shareholder assessment, and is thus fairly unimportant for anything else. In spite of it’s usefulness however, it is sometimes criticized for giving inaccurate results unless the NOPAT is completely accurate. Inaccuracies can even include not taking into account depreciation, and is therefore hard to be spot on.