the ones most likely to take my advice are the ones who don't want to be bothered doing it themselves, far more than any other single trait.
Of the people who would look up and carry out the financial advice themselves an the ones who come to an adviser to carry it out, there may be some imbalance in terms of wanting to bother. Both groups are still highly selected compared to the general population: as you say, "Fewer than you'd think bother to seek advice." The results are entirely explicable by the default of self-selection, and that's much more plausible than advisors matter all that much. (Consider the example of SAT coaching...)
Where's the randomized beef?
Give me a practical model for a randomized study, please. Until you have that, let's work with the evidence we have available. And that evidence seems pretty consistent with my beliefs(that I've had since before I started this job) that advisors don't meaningfully improve investment returns per se, but they mildly improve investor tax planning, and they massively improve investor behaviour.
Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor
What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness?
This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a slight focus on EA. But it is nonetheless meant as a general request for financial effectiveness information (effectiveness as in return on invested time mostly). I think this could accumulate a lot of advice and become part of the Repository Repository (which surprisingly has not much advice of this kind yet).
I seed this with a few posts about this found on LessWrong in the comments. What other posts and links about financial effectiveness do you know of?
Rules:
General Advice (from Guide to Rational Investing):
So what are your recommendations? You may give advanced as well as simple advice. The more the better for this to become a real repository. You may also repeat or link advice given elsewere on LessWrong.