Investment Advisor March 2010
Cover Story
Cover Story: Custom Job
All signs point to 2010 as the year in which many substantive retirement planning reforms will either be cemented or set into motion by Congress...
Features
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The Battle for 401(k) Accounts
Powered by Standard & Poor's MarketScope Advisor Judging by the numbers, there has been no decrease in the investing public's appetite for exchange traded funds: ETF...
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Retirement Specialist
The question of retirement is one of the biggest issues facing our society today. It's part of the healthcare debate when the subject is Medicare...
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Letting Go
In a culture that's all about striving, attaining, and acquiring, one of life's greatest challenges is knowing when and how to let go. It's hard...
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Structuring for Success
As football fans are well aware, the New Orleans Saint overtook the Indianapolis Colts to win this year's NFL Super Bowl championship. To outperform the...
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Subtraction Through Addition
Anyone who has studied basic portfolio construction understands that it's possible to reduce the overall risk in a portfolio by adding an asset class that...
Beginnings
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Asset Allocation
If there's anything in the economy about which to be optimistic Gary Shilling, the Springfield, New Jersey-based economist and advisor, thinks it's the de-leveraging of...
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Venture Populist: The "First-Mover Advantage" Myth
The conventional wisdom of venture investing is populated with a myriad of musty and meaningless maxims that do little to develop due diligence deft. The...
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TD Ameritrade Stands Tall
At its 14th annual conference, held February 3-6 in Orlando, TD Ameritrade Institutional reported record attendance of 2,000, including 1,200 advisors. That strong showing matched...
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Changes at the Top for RIA Units at Fidelity and Schwab
At a time when growth in the RIA channel has been robust to say the least, the two largest custodians have announced executive changes and...
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More Advisors Embrace Alternatives
Advisors are increasingly turning to alternative investments, not as a source of outsized returns, but rather to provide true diversification to clients' portfolios, according to...
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Lightyear Buys ING B/Ds
Private equity firm Lightyear Capital LLC announced February 1 that it had completed its acquisition of the three independent broker/dealers that formerly constituted the ING...
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GroupThink
? The Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA) recently elected two new board members to its leadership team--Ron Mastrogiovanni, president and CEO of HealthView Services, a...
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Changes
? Former Schwab Advisor Services executive David Welling has joined Black Diamond Performance Reporting as chief solutions officer and will oversee sales, marketing, product management...
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Upgrades
Fusion Advisor Network, the co-op-like broker/dealer and practice management service provider led by Philip Palaveev and Stuart Silverman, has added five firms with 18 professionals...
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Numerology: Worried, but Staying Put
A new survey conducted by ING's U.S. Retirement Services unit found that retirement plan participants employed at colleges, universities, and post-secondary schools have become less...
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Washington Watch: Dodd Says Act Now on Financial Reform
As Washington lay blanketed in more than two feet of snow last month, lawmakers in the Senate were still busy trying to crank out a...
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Editor's Note: A Word Not From Our Sponsors
During Tom Bradley's welcoming speech at the 14th annual TD Ameritrade Institutional conference last month, the ebullient Mr. Bradley was waxing on about certain (to...
Columns
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The Affluentialist: What Do Counselors Think About Clients?
As we've explored in several previous columns, the financial planning part of advising affluent families is often the easiest piece of a workable solution. More...
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The Green Advisor: More Investors Going Green, But Advisors?
During his first State of the Union address on January 27, President Barack Obama said, "The nation that leads the clean energy economy will be...
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Formulas for Success: What's a Young Advisor to Do?
One reason for the emergence of advisory firm consolidators is that many in the next generation of professionals are either unwilling or unable to buy...
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Clark at Large: Hope and Change
Over the past months, I've written rather extensively about the Obama Administration's proposed securities industry reregulation, the various proposals of what that might look like,...
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The Fast Track: Blue Chips
Having done hundreds of recruitment gigs over the years, I thought I'd seen it all. But, recently, as I recruited a junior advisor for one...
Conclusions
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Broker/Dealer Briefing: Independent Broker/Dealers Celebrate Earned Credibility
The leadership of the Financial Services Institute (FSI) threw down the gauntlet in front of legislators and regulators at its OneVoice annual meeting in New...
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RIA Growth at LPL
The biggest independent broker/dealer is growing rapidly in another way: as a custodian for advisors that use LPL Financial as the custodian for their RIA...
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B/D News
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro told chief compliance officers attending the Commission's second CCOOutreach seminar January 26 that since more and more firms registered with the...
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Two Insurers Give Back
While some consumers (and advisors) are not overly fond of major corporations and some question the ethics of big insurers in light of the 2008-2009...
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Insurance Update: House of Good Repute
Suppose you have a client who owns a small chain of elegant cafes, known for using the best ingredients, organic foods, and artisan breads. The...
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Branded
LeComte Moore, managing director at DeWitt Stern, says his company initiated work on its new reputation risk insurance coverage because, with "the advent and increased...
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Expert's Corner: The Use of Gold in Portfolios
In times of trouble, gold is the perennial hot topic. "Buy gold--it's the only safe asset," goes the cry. And, for the past decade, it...
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The High Performance Coach: Building, and Restoring, Trust
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players In this oft-quoted soliloquy from his comedy "As You Like It," Shakespeare shows the...
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Soapbox: What Comes First: Nation or Client?
One key element of financial planning is to identify legal means to reduce clients' payments for state and local income taxes, estate and inheritance taxes,...
Sidebar Stories
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Income Initiatives; Social Security
President Obama's State of the Union address included a number of retirement savings initiatives that he'd like to see enacted: the automatic IRA, an expanded...
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What the Research Found
The research paper, Can Precious Metals Make Your Portfolio Shine, cited in this article was authored by C. Mitchell Conover, The Robins School of Business,...
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Merrill Discovers Retirement
It appears that Merrill Lynch, now ensconced in Bank of America, has realized the importance of retirement planning to its clients and potential clients, and...
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The Problems With Pensions
Members of Congress and retirement experts are working feverishly to ensure that pension plan funding relief is enacted soon. James Klein, president of the American...
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Redefining for Retirement
There's a "different mindset" that advisors need to have when focusing on the distribution phase of a client's life, says Scott Slater, and the firms...
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Advice for Advisors
Working with some 1,000 retirement plans certainly keeps Gerald Wernette of Rehmann Financial abreast of the latest trends in retirement. He has some first-person advice...
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About the Advisor
Gerald Wernette Principal and Director, Retirement Plan Services Rehmann Financial 39300 W. Twelve Mile Road, Suite 100 Farmington Hills, Michigan Phone: 248-579-1100 E-mail: gerald.wernette@rehmann.com Web site: www.rehman.com Areas of Expertise: retirement plan consulting,...
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Two Exercises for Letting Go
When I have trouble letting go of emotional strain, I use either of these two simple exercises: 1. I imagine placing specific worries or concerns in...
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How to Poach Talent from Larger Firms
The institutionalization of larger advisory firms gives smaller firms a tremendous recruiting advantage--and opportunity. The hardest part of bringing a young advisor into a small...
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SEC Issues Guidance on Climate Change Disclosure
The political debate over climate change continues following the December global meeting in Copenhagen. It certainly didn't help matters that in mid-February Washington D.C. was...
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