Sadly, in many cases this just isn't true, and the so called "expertise" in question amounts to little more than a shot in the goddamn dark. Here are a few cases of experts that probably shouldn't inspire as much confidence as they do.

People get paid a lot of money to be experts on things, so one would assume they're much more knowledgeable than the average Joe or, at the very least, a blindfolded monkey throwing darts.

6 Stock Market Experts

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Many of us find the stock market too intimidating to put money into, or at least we would if we had the money to invest in the first place. How do you decide what stocks to pick? We can't even pick where to go for lunch half the time and we understand lunch.



...don't we?

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That's when you call in a professional, or if you're not rich, you buy a pre-set package of stocks and bonds that a professional has pre-picked for you, and then sit back and, uh...

Watch your stocks grow more slowly than if you picked them at random.

Yes, as it turns out, the majority of professionally managed funds picked by stock market experts (70 to 85 percent) actually underperform the Dow or S&P indexes, which are technically supposed to represent the average performance of the market to begin with.



Results not typical.

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If you do have to peddle your nest egg off to someone else, try to hand it to Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway stocks have outperformed the index by 11.14 percent on average for over 30 years. So it's not like financial advisors can't know what to pick. They usually just don't.

But hey, there is some good news: When going up against a bunch of dudes throwing darts at a chart to randomly pick their stocks, the stock professionals performed better.

Barely.