It was a less than ideal situation. When Jeffrey Keefe left his job as a financial advisor with Ameriprise to start his own Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based firm two years ago, he decided he'd just stay put in the office he shared with several...

Registered Rep.: What was the scariest moment in your career? Geri Pell: Jumping off a 130-foot cliff on a zip-line at a leadership/change retreat. RR: The most triumphant? GP: Qualifying for the Chairman's Advisory Council at Ameriprise. RR: A...

ARE YOU CHARGING ENOUGH? That's hard to say. These days, discounting runs rampant in the financial-advisory industry: Firms allow giant haircuts on commissions, wrap-account fees and even fully waived mutual fund loads. Meanwhile, fees on assets...

A list of the biggest independent b/d firms by number of reps. ...

Ameriprise Financial Services has long been accused of possessing a culture that’s more concerned with sales commissions than compliance. The latest allegations against the company from the New Hampshire Bureau of Securities Regulation...

In its fall 2005 debut on the New York Stock Exchange as an independent company, Wall Street had little enthusiasm for Ameriprise Financial. Its shares were greeted with a yawn, sliding more than 2 percent after the completion of the spin-off out...

In the retail brokerage and financial advisory businesses, the customer, as they say, is king. After all, the vast majority of new business is driven by referrals, and referrals come from happy clients. So it might interest you to know how the...

In 2006, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company received $14.8 million in total compensation, according to the Corporate Library. That's a 9.4 percent increase from 2005. Those sound like some pretty big numbers especially to the Democratic...

Wachovia Securities' takeover of 120-year-old A.G. Edwards is a big deal a surprising deal, even. But not just because with 14,784 FAs and $1.147 trillion in client assets it creates the third-largest brokerage after Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney...

What does integrity have to do with superior portfolio performance? A lot, say researchers in a study released in May, which found that advisors who demonstrate high levels of moral and emotional competency outperformed the S&P 500 by 73 percent...