Brooke’s Note: RIAs were already winning in the marketplace in two important ways — by poaching assets directly from brokers and by hiring brokers as employees (with assets coming in tow). Now there’s a third way that they’re getting business from brokers: The brokers are simply paying RIAs de facto protection money to stay cool with DOL regs relating to 401(k) assets. Pick your cliché but the thinking of many brokers is that half a loaf is better than none so they’re giving up a portion of their revenue stream in exchange for an agreement that ...

Although RIAs are up in arms over a bill introduced in Congress in April that would create a self-regulatory organization to provide advisor oversight instead of the SEC, they may not have much to worry about just yet. See: Avoiding FINRA oversight may depend on talking sense to an options-trading House Republican.

At least, that’s what Duane Thompson, senior policy advisor for fi360 and former managing director for the Financial Planning Association, says.

“It’s not like the sky’s falling in tomorrow.”

Just a bill, sitting here on Capitol Hill

Thompson’s sanguine attitude comes from a certain ...

Brooke’s Note: This article has so many dimensions it’s hard to know where to start. It certainly shows how the RIA model can thrive. It also continues a theme of the old Wall Street guard kicking butt when they avail themselves of an independent practice — in this case, in particularly grand fashion. If there’s a metaphorical intersection between ultrahigh-net-worth families and Wall Street, it’s the Greenwich, Conn. train station. That’s pretty much where Fieldpoint has set up its offices.

When a group of former Merrill Lynch CEOs and top executives, dissatisfied with the service they ...

Brooke’s Note: The definition of a good financial advisor these days has expanded to everything from achieving alpha to picking up Alphie from doggie day care for that $30-million client (just this once!) If you’re a financial advisor with 80 to 100 clients then there is no logical endpoint for a day or a week. But there has to be one or, logically, the whole operation will melt down. Managing this challenge is difficult but Abby Salameh, a veteran of advisor management, child-raising and New York — the ultimate qualifications for knowing how to handle over stimulus, has done ...

Brooke’s Note: When one private-equity firm steps out of a financial services firm and another steps in, it can be as yawn-inducing as the refinancing of a condo in Dubuque. But as Summit Partners apparently looks for a colleague firm to replace itself as Focus Financial’s big investor (and, indeed, the whole firm) that affects an all-star cast of autonomous RIAs, it catches my attention. See: What’s really going on with Focus Financial?. Deal makers are perking up at the potential for a big transaction — or to see what lessons can be learned. If Focus commands a ...

Brooke’s Note: Early in my career I spent six years as a business broker based in Cambridge, Mass. Occasionally we’d list a laundromat for sale and run an advertisement for it in the Boston Sunday Globe. On Monday morning, the phone would be flying off the hook.The callers were doctors, lawyers, MBAs and engineers, in addition to recent immigrants who composed our more usual pool of buyers. The reason for such avid interest in owning a laundromat among professionals was that the rooms of washers and dryers were presumed to be self-operating. But buyers who purchased these ...

Brooke’s Note: This story contains three heartwarming aspects. It shows that you’re ever too old to reinvent yourself. It shows that something as traditionally obtuse as a municipality can get out of the way of its own rules in making a technocratic decision. And it shows how the RIA model can be the linchpin of making this all happen.

Advisor John Beirne Jr. just passed his first giant test helming his RIA since leaving Merrill Lynch in January, beating out 13 other advisory firms — including a team from UBS — for a $550 million account. See: A $2 billion ...

Brooke’s Note: This article contains a quote that compares Ron Rhoades to Thomas Jefferson. Jaded journalists like me are generally averse to such lofty hyperbole and I’m wary of heaping too much expectation on the newly appointed chairman of NAPFA. But I really didn’t blink an eye at that opinion. Many times during the past couple of years, I have reached out to Rhoades for a comment and he has reacted by sending a column, sometimes within a matter of hours, of several thousand words — mostly error- and typo-free. Rhoades has taken on the annuity industry, Goldman ...

On May 10, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced it had suffered a $2 billion loss (soon estimated at upwards of $3 billion) in a six-week period by its London-based chief investment office. The firm’s public relations department got busier than usual — which means it was probably pretty close to spontaneously combusting.

But unlike JPM’s PR counterparts at Goldman Sachs, who were recently caught flatfooted by the media firestorm resulting from a New York Times’ op-ed written by disgruntled former advisor Greg Smith, this was a carefully coordinated increase in activity.

Following the announcement by JPMorgan, media outlets scrambled to ...

Brooke’s Note: The battle by advisors for retail assets relies to a large extent on who wins rollover assets from 401(k) plans. But to win rollover assets from 401(k) plans, you need an inside track with 401(k) plan participants. The battle for 401(k) plan participants comes down to who can cheaply supply advice and in a way that works under new, no-nonsense DOL regulations. See: Why the DOL’s proposed 401(k) rules could ding brokers and leave the spoils to RIAsWith their standing as fiduciaries, RIAs have brightening prospects as brokers get tied ...