MARMAC

Another option is to hire a registered investment adviser (RIA), who will create, in effect, a personal mutual fund for you and serve as the manager of it. RIAs usually require a large minimum to start with, ranging from $50,000 to $5 million, with the average minimum being about $250,000.
An RIA manages your money for you on an ongoing basis, for a fee that is usually a percentage of the money you’ve given her to manage. This percentage can range from .25 to 3 percent a year, but you should not pay more than 1.5 percent including all commissions. Think about this. The amount you pay is a percentage of the money she is managing: Isn’t this a great incentive for her to make your money grow? If you gave her $100,000 initially, and by the end of the year you had
$200,000, if you were paying her 1 percent, she’d have made $2,000. (And I hope you would send her an enormous bouquet of flowers as well.) If you lose money, she loses, too. This is an adviser who is truly on the same side of the fence as you and whose compensation is attached to a real incentive to make money for you.
Most RIAs will ask you to sign what is called a discretionary account trading form, where you give the RIA permission to trade your account without getting your permission for every transaction. This is absolutely the only time you should even consider doing something like this. You must still make sure that your money is held in a reputable institution like Charles Schwab or Fidelity, for example, and all the RIA has the right to do is buy or sell, not withdraw money except for any fees she is owed.
Not many RIAs buy mutual funds because it does not make sense to pay the RIA 1 percent a year to manage your money and also to pay the full expense ratio of the mutual fund. If you decide to hire an RIA, please find out what she invests in before you sign on.