Across the country, registered rep employees of national broker/dealers daydream of chucking it all the scripted days, the morning squawk box and going off on their own. But how far do you go? You can become an independent contractor rep by...
In September, Dale Brown, the chief executive of the Financial Services Institute (FSI), a lobbying group representing 106 member firms with more than 124,000 independent-contractor broker/dealers, hosted an industry conference attended by the...
If you haven't gotten your hooks into enough baby boomer clients those 70 million-plus Americans born between 1946 and 1964 who are now heading toward retirement Congress is about to give you a second chance. Sometime early next year, or perhaps...
Back during the buying panic of the 1990s, it was fashionable to believe: Sell your losers, and run with your winners. Of course, one of the lessons of the subsequent crack up: Don't let your winners run so much that they dominate your portfolio...
Certainly, going indie has a lot of appeal. And there are lots of stories of happy former wirehouse brokers who have flourished on their own. But it doesn't just happen. Take, for example, the wirehouse rep from the West Coast. The rep hadn&...
Now that it's standing on its own two feet, Ameriprise Financial is ready to spend some dollars and it's got more than a few to spare, thanks to a $1 billion bequest from former parent American Express. The firm, formerly known as American Express...
Florida has evolved into a U.S. tax and creditor protection haven, seducing wealthy individuals to migrate south. One of the biggest draws is that Florida imposes no income tax on individuals and trusts.1 As of Jan 1, 2006, there's also no...
The Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act that President Bush signed Sept. 23 included some substantial changes to the legislation initially proposed. What survived the chopping block, what crept in the back door, and what does it all mean for...
We read with great interest GRATs: On a Roll by Julie K. Kwon and Daniel J. Loewy in the June issue. Their article concluded that short-term rolling GRATs can, depending on the circumstances, meet wealth transfer objectives better than a single...
Although trusts are, according to many theories, hundreds of years old, their provisions have changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 300 years. The catalysts are not only increasingly complex laws, but also the fact that trusts are...
