If a person makes a living giving investment advice, can you assume?

that the advice is bad?

Reason: If he knew anything about investing, he would not need to sell his advice. He would be rich from his investments.

I like the way you think
There are a lot of people in this world (even in the world of investing) giving bum advice
You have to do your own homework and THINK for yourself
the same as any other endeavour in life.
Nobody cares more about your money than you, that's for sure!

If the advice was bad, then they would be out of business.
Some people, like my cousin, who is a financial advisor, love their work. He has done well for all his clients. Perhaps because he is a CPA.

I go to a website that offers financial advice for free. The elderly lady gives her analysis free of charge. She of course, acknowledges that she is not a financial advisor.

Her website: low-cost-stock-recommendations

.com

I have discovered through my own years of investing and subscribing to financial newsletters, that you are correct in many cases, the Financial analysts make the majority of their money from fools like me that pay ridiculous subscription fees for average advice.

However, I do not pay for their advice anymore. It is a waste of money

close but no cigar.

***
there's a little problem of scale and risk.

it is unwise to take any investment risk that might result in you not being able to continue to play the investing game next year [and every year, forever].

in practical terms, this means that suffering a drawdown [percentage depth of your portfolio from high to low as it goes down] of more than 30% is a likely knockout blow.

And, it is very difficult to impossible to reliably make more than 1.5 to 2 times the drawdown percentage you are risking.

so, the average guy starting out can't clear more than 30% to 40% per year in his first few years -- because he can't live with a drawdown [loss] of more than about 25% [or 30% at most].

well, if your starting capital is only 100k and you can only likely make 35% on average -- that's only 35k net income for the whole year.

which isn't enough.

so, if you don't have somewhere on the order of 300k trading capital, you aren't going to make a living at it without selling your expertise and knowledge on the side.

***
last I checked, the typical business school grad leaves school with a negative net worth due to school loans.

where's s/he going to come up with 300k trading capital given that s/he has zero track record of accomplishing anything?

right in one guess -- s/he isn't.

so, trading for a living is something you have to build capital in order to start doing.

what i'd recommend if you're at all interested is keeping your day job and starting to trade SMALL. if you can't make money trading a 25k account, you'd probably lose it all if you had a 300k account.

and, your day job is selling financial services and investment advice, isn't it? [what else are you likely to know anything about?]

***
PS: retail brokers actually sell the advice of their institution, not their own. without a track record, they don't have anything of their own to sell, now do they?

The market has room for everyone to make money so that is why he is sharing his idea. Most like to share their ideas so everyone can profit from it.

Opinions... They're selling opinions. They may have a little more knowledge.... but it's still down to opinions.

If they're advising on "asset allocation" or types of investments they can be very helpful. When it comes to specific issues......... They can help avoid some dissasters.

A real stock trader will get between 45% and 60% of their trades correct. The real success comes in how they manage the losing positions. Investing portfolios pick more "winners" because they may have a time horizon of over 5 years. But the real proof of success is the total percentage gained, on average, each year.