Registered Rep. recently caught up with Debby McWhinney and spoke with her about the rivalry between the registered investment advisor (RIA) firms that Schwab caters to and Wall Street wirehouses. Here is an excerpt: Registered Rep.: With a lot of...
I recently worked on a court case where a series of small but horribly egregious errors were made in client financial plans. Twelve clients who had invested an aggregate $10 million with a broker at a national wirehouse were suing the broker after...
Brokerage firms have lobbied for a new self-regulatory organization (SRO) model for years, saying the current system of two cops on the beat is redundant and, therefore, too time consuming and expensive. Now that SEC Chairman Christopher Cox has...
In an early November broadcast to the firm's U.S. financial advisors, Morgan Stanley retail head James Gorman announced the rollout of a new compensation program for 2007 one that will increase the firm's spending on compensation by millions of...
Most financial advisors consider themselves retirement experts. Sure, most of them know the minutiae of individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and 401(k)s and, indeed, most would be able to explain to a client why a 403(b) or a SEP-IRA might make...
File this under, It had to happen: the electronic collection plate. According to Donald Trump, writing in his Trump University blog, some Southern Protestant churches are installing ATMs in their lobbies. Trump predicts that if the ATM strategy is...
When did you know you wanted to become an investment advisor? When I was 17 years old, a friend introduced me to the stock market. We bought 10 shares of stock and made some money, and I was hooked. The stock was Armour Meat warrants. We bought it...
In September 2003, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced that hedge funds and other speculators had fleeced mutual fund shareholders. Employing the tactics known as market timing and late trading, the thieves had stolen huge amounts...
Eliot Spitzer may have less than a month left as New York State's attorney general, but the governor elect says there may be at least one more high-profile enforcement action against a major Wall Street firm before he leaves his post in January...
Shelf Space No No: The Hartford Financial Services Group agreed to pay $55 million to settle SEC charges that three subsidiaries of the firm failed to disclose their use of client mutual fund assets to pay brokerage firms to market The Hartford...