A client asked me what i thought of the Italy "no" vote today. I had to give an honest answer. It does not surprise me nor does it bother me in terms of the individual trading strategies I use.
You see, there is a chronic over-reliance on experts who don't actually know any better than you in terms of what will happen next. One only has to look at the logic behind the EU to realize that at some point it would fail.
Greeks are not like Germans and French people are not like Spaniards etc. You get my point?
So what next?
You need to have a tool of techniques and strategies in your financial arsenal that is immune to the political noise around the world. Your strategy should really be independent of gold going up, or stocks going down or this market better than that market because in the end no one can actually predict what tomorrow will bring.
If your advisor tells you otherwise, fire him. And if he protests remind him that no one has a crystal ball. Not even him/her.
(as side question - ask him where his customers yachts are....)
Learning effective financial techniques is not hard. The only reason it is hard is because most advisors don't know about them, have never used them or basically never even studied them so they don't know what they don't know.
You need to ask questions like "how much income can I get from my stock portfolio without buying dividend stocks?" or "how can i enhance the yield of Microsoft from 2% to 10% per annum?"
90% of the time your advisor won't know how to answer these questions. If he does know ask why he has not shown these techniques to you.
You might be surprised at his answers.