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You can use your systematized set of rules to draw good boundaries between yourself and your clients. 

When you run money for a living, you are always sitting at the head of the table. 

Whether you run an RIA or are a CTA, you have to have ownership over everything that happens in the account.

Clients often like to "run ideas by you" - I would strongly advise against this. 

That's not what you do - you run the money based upon your rules or trading model and that's it. 

You don't need any outside help. 

If you are at a big brokerage firm or wirehouse, then you need to manage the relationship in a different way. 

But being a Financial Advisor or Consultant is a marketing job - your expectation is to gather assets, not create trading gains. 

When you're on your own, you have full discretion over the account and if the owner of the money has strong ideas, you can either pass on taking the account or have them open another account somewhere else that they can trade their hunches. 

You don't want their garbage in your portfolio. 

You do not want to take an account where you know there will be trouble ahead of time. 

When you settle for less, you get less than you settled for - and in my experience, it will only get worse. 

Then you're in a living hell and second-guessing yourself because you are now running two models: yours and what you think the client wants to do. 

One of my mentors said that when you do this, "you get the worst of both models." 

The next thing that will happen is that they'll call you to override one of your protective stops because they "know someone who is in the industry" or "they have hunch" that they want to go on. 

This is the time to resign from the account and tell them to work with that person full-time as you obviously don't have their full confidence. 

Boundaries: Good fences make good neighbors. 

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