If tested, most financial advisors worth their proverbial salt could pass a final exam for Beginning 529 Plans without much cramming beforehand. But clients saving for college have the unfortunate habit of posing problems that go beyond the...

Ever since brokers started swapping shares under that buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan, parallels have been drawn between Wall Street and the casino. Wall Street itself recognizes the similarities. Many proprietary trading firms, in fact...

Talk about going from bad to worse. To optimistic insiders who bought shares of their own banking companies over the last 12 months, the stocks must have felt like falling knives. Indeed, the entire financial system seems to be falling apart so...

If you have small-business clients, they may be desperate for cash right now or worried about having enough cash in the coming months. With the government's mid-October announcement that it plans to take stakes in the country's major banks, credit...

Searching for the perfect niche, an independent advisor in southern Florida thinks she's hit the jackpot widows. But how best to go about cultivating them as clients? To offer her advice, we asked for comments from our panel of experts: Hellen...

Michael Corbat certainly has his work cut out for him. Tapped to head up Citigroup's Global Wealth Management unit (GWM) in the middle of the global financial crisis, Corbat is walking into a banged-up Smith Barney franchise. (Of course, what big...

Steve Leuthold, the veteran chief investment officer of the Leuthold Group, is bullish. Why should you care? Leuthold, a curmudgeonly value manager who relies heavily on quantitative data (in addition to fundamentals), has posted a pretty solid...

In October, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the private retirement plans of Americans including 401(k) and IRA accounts dropped by some $2 trillion, or 20 percent in the 15 months ending September 30. Yes, those are big, scary...

In September and October, Houston-based financial advisor Mike Robertson was getting 60 calls a day from panicked clients. On Long Island, New York, about 5 percent of Mark Snyder's clients hit the phones. They're saying, What's happening? says...

Faced with gyrating markets, many retirees worry about exhausting their savings. To calm nerves, some clients may insist on reducing their spending. But if withdrawal plans have been carefully designed, advisors have little reason to make major...