The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging Dawn Bennett, the founder and CEO of Bennett Group Financial Services, with fraud for “grossly inflating the amount of managed assets and exaggerating the investment returns actually obtained for customers.” The SEC alleges that Bennett used her radio program, “Financial Myth Busters,” to falsely claim that her clients’ returns were in the top one percent of firms worldwide. The SEC said Bennett also claimed to manage $2 billion in assets, when the real amount was never more than $407 million. “We allege that in a calculated effort to inflate their profile and prestige, Bennett and her firm over-hyped the amount of assets they manage for customers and the actual returns on their investments,” Sharon Binger, Director of the SEC’s Philadelphia Regional Office, said in a statement.
The Hybrid RIA for the Ultra Rich
FallLine Securities has launched a new hybrid RIA platform exclusively for private wealth advisors dealing with ultra-high-net-worth clients. The firm, which combines a broker/dealer with a turnkey technology/services platform, wants to create an alternative to the big firms where advisors can feel more independence and build their business more quickly. “The wealth management business has changed dramatically over the past decade,” FallLine CEO John Straus said. “There is a clash of opposing forces. Big firms are interested in increasing their margins through scale and standardization. On the other side, private clients and their advisors are looking for service providers that are flexible and willing to accommodate their various needs.”
AdvisoryWorld Integrates With Orion and Intuit
At last year’s Orion Advisory Services’ Fuse conference, AdvisoryWorld was awarded “Best Use of Orion API” and “Best Research and Analytics Integration.” AdvisoryWorld wants to defend its titles this year by integrating its Proposal Generation with Intuit and Orion’s New Account Center. The integration lets advisors automatically transfer a client’s aggregated account data to create a proposal, and then seamlessly transfer the data to Orion to digitally open a new account. The company will unveil integrations at the 2015 Fuse Conference, which kicks off Thursday in Park City, Utah.
Adolescents Are More Financially Rational Than You Think
According to new research published online in the journal Cognitive Development, parents should be giving their adolescent children a lot more credit when it comes to economic rationality. Duke researchers discovered that children ages 10 to 16 can be more analytical in their economic choices than many slightly older young adults. In the study, participants were presented with three scenarios and asked to pick the best one. Each had a set of outcomes that could lead to winning or losing varying sums of money. On average, young adults who were 22 years old calculated the number of wins and losses based on the most wins, ignoring the dollar amounts. However, adolescents typically accounted for the magnitude of the potential win or loss to minimize loss. “I was surprised by how consistent the effects were,” said Dr. Scott Huettel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. “Pretty much everywhere we looked, adolescents were the ones who looked more economically rational.”
