In this section we present key findings and insights from our survey questions on practice management and operations, including services offered, the most time-consuming activities, professional designations, custody relationships and documentation trends.
A ten-year veteran of a large wirehouse firm says he's solicited regularly about switching firms. I pay attention to the deals. I'm curious to know what they're offering. I'm not really ready to move, but they keep trying, he says. Of course they...
The independent channel has long been advertised as The Next Big Thing. With its 95,000 or so advisors, the independents are the largest subset in the industry. But the great diaspora of wirehouse advisors going indie never materialized. It is...
Recently introduced legislation threatens to change the IRS rules on independent contractor worker classification and the Financial Service Group (FSI) is worried.
Morgan Stanley’s recent move to increase trading risk and add traders a la Goldman Sachs is a just another bad strategy in a long line of lousy executions by management, says Dick Bove, vocal analyst of Rochdale Securities in a note released...
The New York Post reports today that Bernie Madoff is dying of cancer. According to an inmate at the North Carolina prison, Madoff is telling everyone that he doesn’t have long to live.
Merrill Lynch is embarking on an aggressive “push” to hire financial advisors, according to the Financial Times. The story says that since the signing bonuses are greater than those handed out in the bull market of 2006 and 2007, it is...
UBS has stepped up its courtship of former Merrill executive Bob McCann, discussions that began in June, according to a story in the Financial Times. If he is hired, he would replace Marten Hoekstra, head of UBS’s wealth management business...
Much beloved by Merrill financial advisors, Dan Sontag is stepping down as head of Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management. The news of his departure comes just a day after it was announced that Sallie Krawcheck, the former head of wealth...
