Good Financial Advisors Love Clients Who Ask Questions

And good financial advisors give good accounting about what went well and what didn't go so well in the past year.

You expect a few duds in a diverse portfolio. You expect to know about them and to learn from them.

You expect complete numbers that tell you what the returns on your investments have actually been.  You have a right to know how much money went into and is now in each of your portfolio folders.

If you knew someone naive with a financial advisor who didn't like questions or who didn't give a good, detailed accounting, would you not advise him or her to run away?   Something is terribly wrong. 

We trust our ALS organizations that fund research to be very much like good financial advisors. They help us place our investments in the most promising science. We know that some things might work and many won't work, and we expect to know about them and to learn from them.

Instead of good, businesslike accounting of projects, investments, and outcomes, we get cherry-picked  public statements on "promising" results that don't give us a clear picture of the portfolio. We see selective cumulative summaries instead of specifics.  Instead of answers to our questions, we often get evasive responses, or worse yet, no responses.

Surely they would be smarter advisors and we would all be better (and bigger) investors if we had businesslike accounting of their (ergo our) research investments in the last year. Surely it would advance the science and the funding available from investors.