The events on Wall Street over the past six months, coupled with the toll they have taken on many advisors, have caused me to revisit the work of William Glasser, M.D. and his thoughts on human behavior. In his book Control Theory (1984, Harper...
Ever since brokers started swapping shares under that buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan, parallels have been drawn between Wall Street and the casino. Wall Street itself recognizes the similarities. Many proprietary trading firms, in fact...
Talk about going from bad to worse. To optimistic insiders who bought shares of their own banking companies over the last 12 months, the stocks must have felt like falling knives. Indeed, the entire financial system seems to be falling apart so...
Staying on top of new industry rules and regulations is one of the greatest challenges facing registered reps and their supervisors these days. Overnight, long-established practices become violations because of an incomprehensible subparagraph to...
I have a friend, a financial advisor, who keeps what he calls The Yell-At-Tom Index. (His name is Tom.) Interestingly, The Yell-At-Tom Index (TYAT) is low right now, he says. That's right. Despite the utter carnage in the equity markets, the...
Market share shifts in periods of crisis just ask Jamie Dimon. You have to make bold moves to get a maximum share of the opportunity. If you are in a rut, there is no better time to consider transforming yourself. No one can attest to the power of...
If you have small-business clients, they may be desperate for cash right now or worried about having enough cash in the coming months. With the government's mid-October announcement that it plans to take stakes in the country's major banks, credit...
Searching for the perfect niche, an independent advisor in southern Florida thinks she's hit the jackpot widows. But how best to go about cultivating them as clients? To offer her advice, we asked for comments from our panel of experts: Hellen...
Michael Corbat certainly has his work cut out for him. Tapped to head up Citigroup's Global Wealth Management unit (GWM) in the middle of the global financial crisis, Corbat is walking into a banged-up Smith Barney franchise. (Of course, what big...
Steve Leuthold, the veteran chief investment officer of the Leuthold Group, is bullish. Why should you care? Leuthold, a curmudgeonly value manager who relies heavily on quantitative data (in addition to fundamentals), has posted a pretty solid...
