Outside of honoring those specific instructions that you implement on the front end, they have full discretion to buy and sell whatever they see fit. |
The financial adviser's job is to marry up the proper money manager's strategy with your unique individual needs as an individual investor and your tolerance for risk. |
There can be more moving parts to them. It does require that somebody keep up with it. |
There's better tax control inside a separately managed account. |
Typically, in a separately managed account, the fee that you pay as an investor includes transaction costs, so there's no incentive for the money manager to run up transactions on you. |
Wall Street has lost business to fee-based advisers in the last several years. |