> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.incomestead.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How to Tell If Your Financial Advisor Is Doing Their Job: Ask for the Paperwork - URL: https://www.incomestead.com/blog/how-to-tell-if-your-financial-advisor-is-doing-their-job/ - Published: 2026-09-10T05:18:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-13T04:44:08.000Z - Description: Most ways of judging an advisor measure the market's work, not theirs. Here's the test I'd run instead, and it resolves on documents rather than feelings. - Author: Stefano Starkel - Tags: DIY vs Managed, #stage-2 To tell if your financial advisor is doing their job, stop grading returns and start asking for records. Their job is not to beat the market — it is to run a process on your money. A process that ran left evidence: dated review notes, trade confirmations, a written policy, a reason attached to each change. Ask for the last twelve months of it. Whatever comes back is your answer, and it is a far better one than how the meetings felt. TL;DR - **Performance is the wrong test.** A rising market lifts a diversified book whoever is holding the pen — so a good year is weak evidence either way. - **Supervision is the right one** — and it is checkable, because supervision leaves paper. - **Run a twelve-month audit.** Six jobs, six documents. Ask for each one by name. - **A missing document is not proof of negligence** — but it is proof you cannot verify the work, and neither could anyone who had to take over. - **The gap is yours either way.** Whether you stay or go, write the policy the audit shows is missing. On this page 1. [Why is performance the wrong way to judge your advisor?](#why-is-performance-the-wrong-way-to-judge-your-advisor) 2. [The twelve-month evidence audit](#the-twelve-month-evidence-audit) 3. [What does a year of evidence actually look like?](#what-does-a-year-of-evidence-actually-look-like) 4. [What does a missing document actually prove?](#what-does-a-missing-document-actually-prove) 5. [What should you do with the answer?](#what-should-you-do-with-the-answer) 6. [Frequently asked questions](#frequently-asked-questions) ## Why is performance the wrong way to judge your advisor? Because most of the number belongs to somebody else. In a year when global equities rise, a diversified book rises. That is the market's work and your own allocation decision, arriving in your account wearing your advisor's name on the statement. In a year when equities fall, the same account falls, and that is not a firing offence either. Every popular way of answering this question makes the same mistake in a different costume. Judge on returns and you are grading the weather. Judge on communication and you are grading a personality. Judge on "fit" and you are grading a feeling you had in a meeting. All three can look excellent in a year where nothing was actually governed. > You are not paying for the market's work. You are paying for someone to run a process on your money — and a process either left records, or it did not happen. I run my own leveraged, multi-strategy book as a one-man family office, and I grade myself on exactly this basis every week. Not "how did it do" — the market decides that. What I check is whether the process ran: did I look on the day I said I'd look, did I act on the rule instead of the mood, and did I write down why. When I skip it, there is no record, and no amount of a good year covers that up. The useful version of your question is therefore narrower and much easier to answer: **what did they actually do, and can they show you?** That question sits underneath the bigger one I've written about elsewhere — [whether to run your money yourself, hand it to a robo, hire an RIA, or govern it](https://www.incomestead.com/blog/diy-robo-ria-or-governance/) — but you cannot sensibly answer the bigger one until you know what you are actually getting today. ## The twelve-month evidence audit A decent advisor is doing a handful of supervision jobs that have nothing to do with picking: keeping a review cadence, rebalancing back to target, maintaining a written policy, acting as a behavioural brake, documenting an audit trail, and arranging continuity if they are hit by a bus. My earlier piece on [what a 1% fee actually buys](https://www.incomestead.com/blog/should-i-fire-my-financial-advisor/) itemises those six and what happens to each one the day you leave. This post does something different with the same list. It does not ask what the jobs are worth. It asks **for the receipts** — because each of those jobs, done properly, leaves a document behind, and you can ask for it. The twelve-month evidence audit Ask for each item by name. Give them a fortnight. | The job | Ask for this | If it doesn't exist | | ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Review cadence** | Dated notes or agendas for each scheduled review in the last 12 months | The calendar wasn't driving. Your attention was. | | **Rebalancing to target** | Trade confirmations showing trims and adds back toward your target weights | Your risk has been drifting wherever the market took it. | | **A written policy** | Your investment policy statement — with your name and a date on it | Decisions were measured against nothing. There is no standard to have met. | | **A behavioural brake** | A note written *at the time* of the last bad drawdown, saying what they advised | Nobody can now tell whether they steadied you or agreed with you. | | **An audit trail** | A short reason recorded beside each material change | Last year's decisions can only be half-remembered, never reconstructed. | | **Continuity** | A named successor, and where a copy of your policy is held | The process lives in one head, and you don't own a copy of it. | Send it as one email. You are not accusing anyone of anything — you are asking a professional for the file on your own account, which is an ordinary request that an organised adviser answers in an afternoon. The CFA Institute's position paper on [investment policy statements for individual investors](https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/sites/default/files/-/media/documents/article/position-paper/investment-policy-statement-individual-investors.pdf?ref=incomestead.com) devotes a whole section to *governance* — naming who is responsible for executing the policy and for "monitoring the results of implementation of the policy", and requiring a described process for reviewing and updating it — which is why its absence, of all six, is the one I would take most seriously. ## What does a year of evidence actually look like? Take a book of **$1,340,000** in a fairly typical managed relationship: quarterly reviews promised, a balanced allocation, one uncomfortable stretch in the spring. Here is the sort of answer that comes back, and it is usually mixed rather than damning: - **Reviews:** four scheduled, **two** held — both in calm months, neither during the spring drawdown. - **Rebalancing:** one trim, in November. Nothing in the spring, when the weights had moved most. - **Written policy:** a risk-tolerance questionnaire from the year you opened the account. No targets, no bands, no cadence. - **Behavioural brake:** two phone calls, no notes. Nobody can say what was advised. - **Audit trail:** trade confirmations only — *what* was done, never *why*. - **Continuity:** "the firm would look after it." No name. There is decent evidence that the writing-down is the load-bearing part, not a formality. Gollwitzer and Sheeran's meta-analysis of [implementation intentions across 94 independent tests](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601%2806%2938002-1?ref=incomestead.com) found that specifying *when and how* an action will be taken, in advance, produced a medium-to-large improvement in whether it actually got done — though a much larger 2024 meta-analysis (Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer, 642 tests) puts the effect at d = .36, so that original figure is very likely inflated. That is a finding about human follow-through in general rather than about advisers — but it is the mechanism the review-cadence job depends on, and it is why an unwritten cadence is the one I'd expect to thin first. Read that honestly and it is not a scandal. It is a competent person doing the visible half of the job. But look at *when* the gaps fall: the reviews that were missed and the rebalance that never happened are both in the one stretch of the year where supervision was the whole point. That is the pattern worth noticing — not that nothing happened, but that the process thinned exactly when the market got loud. > A process that only runs in calm months isn't a process. It's a preference. Notice too that on the raw number, this year could easily have looked fine. Two reviews, a tidy statement, a recovered spring. Every test based on how it went would have passed it. ## What does a missing document actually prove? Less than you might want it to, and this is where I would be careful. Plenty of genuinely good advisers do the work and record it badly. A phone call that talked you out of selling at the bottom was real whether or not anyone typed a note afterwards. Some firms keep excellent internal records and are simply slow to hand them over. And a small practice that has looked after your family for twenty years may run on judgment and continuity that no filing cabinet captures. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. > An undocumented process has to be taken on trust every single time — and trust is not a control. It is what you rely on when you have no control. What a missing document *does* prove is narrower, and still worth a great deal: **you cannot verify the work, and neither can anybody else.** Not you this year. Not your spouse if you are unavailable. Not the next adviser, if there is one. So treat the audit as a conversation opener rather than a verdict. Send the list, read what comes back, and ask about the gaps directly. A good adviser will be a little embarrassed about the missing note and will start writing them. That is a win, and you got it by asking a specific question rather than a vague one. ## What should you do with the answer? Here is the part most people miss. Whatever the audit returns, **the written policy is yours, not theirs.** If the audit comes back thin and you leave, you inherit all six jobs at once and no document to run them from — which is the trap I've watched self-directed investors walk into cheerfully. If the audit comes back thin and you stay, nothing changes until there is a standard for the relationship to be held to. And if the audit comes back strong, a policy in your own hand is still what makes next year *countable* instead of re-litigated. So write it, this week, before you decide anything about the relationship. Purpose, target weights and the bands you'll tolerate, a review cadence you'll actually keep, your posture on margin if you use it, and who holds a copy if you can't. That document is what turns "is my adviser doing their job?" from a feeling into a question with an answer — next year, and every year after. What you have just done, incidentally, has a name. Checking whether a written policy exists, whether the cadence was kept, and whether decisions left a trail is **governance** — the layer above strategy that family offices run as a matter of course and almost every private investor skips. It is the thing your fee was mostly buying, and it is the one part of the arrangement you can own outright whoever manages the money. The [Governance Score](https://www.incomestead.com/blog/governance-score/#tool-governance-score) is our attempt to put a single honest number on it, and the audit you just ran is most of its raw material. Do this next Write the standard before you judge anyone against it. The free **Investment Charter** walks you through purpose, target weights and bands, a review cadence, your margin posture and who holds a copy — and hands you back a printable charter and a `charter.yaml` you own. It runs in your browser, on your own numbers. [Write your Investment Charter →](https://www.incomestead.com/blog/personal-investment-policy-statement/#tool-investment-charter) ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I know if my financial advisor is doing a good job? Ask for the last twelve months of records: dated review notes, rebalancing trade confirmations, your written policy, a contemporaneous note from the last drawdown, a reason recorded beside each material change, and the name of whoever covers your account if they cannot. What comes back tells you what was actually run. Returns tell you what the market did. ### What records should my financial advisor be able to show me? At minimum, the documents above — they are records of your own account, and asking for them is ordinary. An organised adviser produces most of it in an afternoon. If the answer is that nothing was written down, that is information too. ### Is it normal for a financial advisor to not contact you for a year? It is common, and it is still a gap. The point is not that a quiet year means neglect — it may not — but that a review cadence you cannot evidence is one nobody was enforcing. If the calendar isn't driving the contact, something else is, and usually that something is how the market has been behaving. ### What are the signs your financial advisor isn't doing their job? The one worth watching is timing: the process thinning exactly when markets get loud. Missed reviews and skipped rebalances clustered in the year's worst stretch matter far more than the same count spread evenly, because that stretch is the whole reason supervision is worth paying for. ### Should I fire my advisor if the records are missing? Not on that alone. Missing documentation shows you cannot verify the work — not that the work was never done. Ask about the gaps first; a good adviser starts writing notes. What should not wait either way is your own written policy, because that gap is yours whichever way you decide. Written by Stefano Starkel, founder of Incomestead, which sells governance software — weigh the argument accordingly. This is education, not personalized advice. I run a leveraged, multi-strategy book myself as a one-man family office and write from that experience; I am not a licensed adviser. The twelve-month audit is a set of questions to ask, not a legal entitlement — you can request your own account records, but an adviser's internal notes and compliance file may not be yours to demand, and rules differ by jurisdiction and by the type of firm. A missing document is not evidence of misconduct. Nothing here is a recommendation about your particular adviser or your particular situation; if you believe you have been harmed, take that to a qualified professional rather than to a checklist. Incomestead recommends. You decide.