Investment Advisor October 2009
Cover Story
Wealth Matters
While the outcomes of the healthcare and financial services reform debates now in high gear in Washington will have pivotal effects on advisors this year...
Features
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Give and Take
Giving to others usually suggests that donors feel they have enough for their own needs. But as bonuses, raises, and jobs themselves have disappeared and...
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Mutual Fund Spotlight: Firm Foundation
A manager who has consistently delivered above average returns to investors in one of the best performing stock mutual funds on the market (the FBR...
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One True Thing
What motivates a client to hire a particular advisor? What separates one advisor from the next? These may be two of the more important questions...
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Not Quite So Risky Business
One of the investment advisor's major tasks is to help manage risk for clients, but if your clients are invested in municipal bonds, you'd better...
Beginnings
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Asset Allocation
Behind the Numbers, with David Kelly In his latest market bulletin, issued on September 8, JPMorgan Funds' chief market strategist takes a look at the investment...
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Venture Populist: The Private Venture Test
I am no stranger to the independent RIA universe. In addition to being a former private wealth manager, my professional career has been largely devoted...
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The ETF Advisor: Real Estate ETFs
With the housing market a mess, credit tight, and default rates for commercial mortgages growing by the week, it's hard to get excited about real...
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SEC Criticized for Madoff
Congress wasted little time in taking SEC officials to task after the securities watchdog's inspector general released September 2 a scathing report on the SEC's...
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Past and Future at Schwab
At a somewhat subdued Schwab Impact 2009 conference in San Diego in the middle of September, advisors who custody with Schwab Advisor Services listened to...
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Fidelity Cuts Costs on Technology, Trading
Fidelity Institutional announced September 10 a range of price cuts and time-bounded fee waivers for advisors who custody client assets at Fidelity. Acknowledging that the...
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Catching Up With: Bill Baldwin
The fiduciary issue is a hot topic among many advisors these days, but at the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, embracing a fiduciary standard...
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GroupThink
? Charles Moran, JD, CFP, is the new chair-elect of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards' Board. He will begin his duties on January...
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Changes
? Benjamin Ledyard, a veteran wealth advisor and former managing director of the Wilmington Trust Company, has joined Silver Bridge Advisors. Ledyard will serve as...
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Upgrades
CRM Software announced September 9 what it called major enhancements to Junxure, its CRM and office management software, including Junxure 8, a complete update to...
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More on Migration
The latest contribution on the migration of brokers arrives in the form of a Cerulli Associates report--Advisor Migration--which estimates that $800 billion will be moving...
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Danger & Opportunity: Financial Services Reform Bill Inevitable
While healthcare reform is priority No. 1 for the Obama Administration, financial services reform is still alive and kicking, as President Obama made very clear...
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Danger & Opportunity: Healthcare Reform Picks Up Momentum
Healthcare reform is still moving ahead, despite opposition from Republicans and well-covered populist discontent over the plan. President Obama spoke with a sense of urgency...
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Danger & Opportunity: He's Got the Momentum
Cliff Asness is known as a hedge fund manager who caters to institutions, is a true believer in momentum investing, and despite his University of...
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Editor's Note: It's All Our Soil
Soon after the battle of Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln wrote to the commander of the victorious Union Army, George Meade, inquiring whether he was able...
Columns
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The Affluentialist: Beyond the Numbers
The advisor had worked for a few months with the highly successful client who owned a wholesale distribution company, carefully noting his goals, family concerns,...
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The Green Advisor: Green Hedge
For some people the terms "green" and "investing" are as diametrically opposed as Democrat and Republican or oil and water. Green denotes tree-hugging hippies and...
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Formulas for Success: The Aftermath
Granted, it's a little early to judge the lasting impact of the 2008 market cataclysm on the advisory business, but celebrating survival after this disaster--and...
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Clark at Large: The Dog That Didn't Bark
The following exchange comes from "Silver Blaze" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gregory: "Is there any other point to which...
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The Fast Track: An Odd Couple
These days, many Baby Boom advisors are still interested in selling their practices, but with shrunken assets under management and depressed practice values--not to mention...
Conclusions
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Retirement Planning: Obama's Retirement Plan
As the Obama Administration moves full steam ahead with healthcare reform, the Administration is also bent on helping more Americans with another pressing issue: saving...
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More Challenges for Target Date Funds
Target-date mutual funds, once the darling of the industry, need lots of improvement when it comes to better practices by managers and fund companies, from...
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Retirement News
The IRS is expected to announce 2010 retirement plan limits on October 15, 2009, the date the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the September CPI-U....
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B/D Briefing: Conversion Time
One of the pleasures of being President is that your influence on Americans doesn't end with your term(s). That's certainly the case with George W....
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B/Ds Warned on Recruiting
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro sent a letter to broker/dealer CEOs on August 31 reminding them of their supervisory obligations under federal securities laws after recent...
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B/D News
Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), said during the CFTC's joint meetings with the SEC in early September (to discuss how...
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Insurance Update: Coverage Options Expand
In the midst of all the troubling news about insurance and insurance companies, there's a ray of sunshine: disability insurance is no longer playing hard...
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Expert's Corner: Look Before You Lay Off
In these tough economic times, many employers need to significantly cut costs and overhead to continue to survive. Some are considering layoffs, while others are...
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The Soapbox: What You Need to Know About Hedge Fund Conversions
Many advisors often ask how to convert hedge funds into mutual funds. These conversion requests can be motivated by several different factors. One reason to...
Sidebar Stories
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The Scope of the Problem
Speaking at the Schwab Impact 2009 conference in San Diego in mid-September, tax and estate planning attorney John Scroggin first poked fun at his profession,...
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Concerning Culture and Control
In a growing advisory practice, particularly one with more than one office, span of control becomes another big challenge. Cultural breaks often occur when satellite...
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Don't Hire Yourself
When hiring to grow their firm or adding a partner, most older (and typically entrepreneurial) advisors make the mistake of trying to hire younger advisors...
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No Work Allowed!
The use of furloughs is increasingly popular throughout many industries, but when employees are furloughed, the employer must make it clear that the employee must...
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Green Energy Gets Green Light
The release of the first round of funding from the Obama Administration's stimulus law--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--to a program that provides cash assistance...
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About the Manager
Charles "Chuck" Akre has been in the securities business since 1968. He previously held positions as shareholder, director, CEO of the asset management division, and...
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Getting Estate Planning Help
The next few years will be a challenging time for advisors to stay current in creating, monitoring, and modifying clients' estate plans. Trusts, tax, and...
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Consider These
In addition to thinking about using grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) for clients in the current atmosphere to help preserve wealth, the California Society of...
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A Recession Silver Lining
For estate planning these days, "the low-interest-rate environment offers incredible advantages," observes Ben Ledyard, director of wealth strategies for Boston-based Silver Bridge Advisors who leads...
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Who's Giving, and How, and Why?
If you're working with clients and want to encourage charitable giving, whom should you talk to, and how? "There is some limited anecdotal evidence that...
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Forget Chicken Little
What's the current state of philanthropy? Eileen Heisman, CEO of National Philanthropic Trust, notes that "when the market was high and we didn't know...
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Beyond the Plan
I spend considerable time and effort in constructing a comprehensive financial plan, but it isn't meant to be a static document that only collects dust...
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Fiduciary Scorecard
As part of the screening process of mutual funds that I might use for my clients, I decided early in 2009 to search for global...
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The Multilife Market
John Ryan of Ryan Insurance Strategy Consultants in Greenwood Village, Colorado, says that a big marketing emphasis these days in disability insurance is multilife sales....
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