Safe Choice and a Good One Unless You're Knowledgeable

I've had my own Edward Jones account for 20 years and more importantly have seen portfolios (largely bonds) put together for my mother in-law and aunt over a 40 year time frame. All have had different representatives.  Bottomline: I trust Edward Jones to do a good job recommending suitable investments and not taking advantage of you.  If you're interested in stock mutual funds you'll do much better if you have the ability/knowledge to do it yourself with Schwab or TD Ameritrade (and perhaps others that I haven't had experience with).  Note that it is quite easy to put together a great portfolio with only 2 funds: you would have easily beaten 99.9% of all mutual funds over the last 10 years by simply buying a 50/50 mix of VBMFX and VTWSX (no load funds) or equivalent.  But don't take my word for it; check it out for yourself.  If you do so, you may want to  substitute UMBWX for VTWSX to get a longer price history that has very similar performance.  At Edward Jones you'll be sold funds with which funds Ed Jones has a conflict of interest (see the fine print that they now include after having incurred large fines).  This however doesn't mean necessarily that the "conflicted" funds are bad.  In fact, I believe that a very good fund on a risk adjusted basis that Jones sells on this "confilicted" basis is FCISX; but if you overlay the performance of FCISX and the 50/50 mix above I think you'll want to do it yourself with the 50/50 mix.