Hello Shreenivas
I read your article with great interest - a lot of thought provoking information in it, particularly as you raise points that are important to folks around the world.
In my own limited experience giving people advice (I am not a professional financial adviser nor a money manager so I offer my experience purely from something like the Barber's perspective - the guy with homespun advice in the excellent book called the Wealthy Barber) I have found a couple of things:
1. People, myself included, have no clue what their long term goals are in terms that can be quantified into meaningful measures that can be implemented into an investment strategy on a consistent basis, after fees and taxes, that could be proven to have successfully met these goals on an ex-post basis. Granted the quarterly meetings to fine tune this might help but the odds are against the investor, the financial planner, and the money manager to have executed this consistently. Institutional investors, particularly pension funds, with life spans that exceed us mere mortals, might qualify for this kind advice as in the long run the ups and downs mostly even out.
2. There is a substantial amount of literature published through CFA's Research Foundation, such as Lifetime Financial Advice, several excellent readings in the CFA program, and non CFA sponsored research, that dispute the notion that 100 minus age should be the equity weighting - there is growing evidence that a lot of us will live well beyond an age that can be sustained through investments in public equity or the implied shift in allocation to safer investments like bonds. The only hope for the vast majority of us is to advocate for government insured DB plans instead of DC plans, and I have seen some sustainable models of how this might play out. The investment industry is to be faulted for the rush to DC plans in search of fee gathering at the expense of investor's savings and providing for an affordable retirement.
I love your second last point "Be ethical and the client money will follow and be retained longer." - this truism is probably why people stay with some advisers for a lifetime, not because they have made money, but because the trust has never been compromised.
My advice has always been "I have no clue. But if you know someone who can let you into the Medallion Fund please let me know. If not, put your eggs into many baskets (which might explain why Quantopian is still around), read, attend meetup groups, and do not retire - continue getting some employment income into the bank account as long as you physically and mentally can - you may be the lucky few who will not need it."
On a final note I have newfound optimism that algorithmic trading can generate the tangency portfolio that is the nirvana in mean-variance optimization.
Best wishes and happy weekend
Savio