Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

This paper investigates whether financial advisers add value to individual investors’ portfolio decisions by comparing portfolios of advised and self‐directed (execution‐only) Dutch individual investors. The results indicate significant differences in characteristics and portfolios between these investor groups, but no evidence of differences in risk‐adjusted performance. The findings indicate that portfolios of advised investors are better diversified and carry significantly less idiosyncratic risk. In addition, evidence from an analysis of investors who switch to advice taking indicates that these findings (at least in part) reflect the effect of advisory intervention.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper examines the relationship between overconfidence and losses from under-diversification among Dutch investors. We find that a lack of proper portfolio diversification is positively associated with overconfidence. Part of this relationship is mediated through the lower propensity of overconfident individuals to hire a professional financial adviser. We use data from the 2005 wave of the DNB Dutch Household Survey that provides us with detailed portfolio data of 257 investors. We proxy for overconfidence by exploiting the difference between measured and self-assessed financial literacy, and use this proxy in a regression model (with and without mediation) to explain the difference between the actual households return and the return that could have been obtained by selecting a portfolio on the efficient frontier with equivalent risk. Our results contribute to the current discussion among policy makers on the role of financial advice and self-perceptions in household financial decision-making.