August 9, 2018 – By Mindy Diamond, WealthManagement.com – Circle back to 2009: The financial crisis had barely passed, Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, and Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years for his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Meanwhile, more than 24,000 financial advisors who changed firms that year worried that the days of outsized recruiting deals were going to be a thing of the past.
August 7, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Oisin Breen, RIABiz – After a number of years damning wealth management with faint praise and token efforts toward more “digital” and more millennial-friendly forms of asset and wealth management, Goldman Sachs & Co. may have just made its biggest move yet toward RIA-ification.
August 3, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Janet Levaux, ThinkAdvisor – One week after it became a publicly traded firm, Focus Financial Partners says it has a new member: Edge Capital Group of Atlanta, which as some $3.5 billion of client assets and six offices.
July 31, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Brooke Southall, RIABiz – It’s one of Shirl Penney’s most sparkling recruiting triumphs and one of Merrill Lynch’s more excruciating poaching losses. A team of mostly millennials broke away to become an RIA with nearly $1 billion in assets. Michael Henley, 34, and only nine years into his career, signed on with Dynasty Financial Partners — where Penney, 41, presides as CEO — to form Wyeth Private Wealth in Chadds Ford, Pa.
July 30, 2018 – By Louis Diamond, WealthManagement.com – Although Registered Investment Advisors have been around for many years, it is still a highly-fragmented and nascent industry. Youth aside, industry reports from Cerulli indicate year-over-year growth for the RIA space and predict that trend to continue, further eroding the mass dominated by banks and brokerages.
July 19, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Brooke Southall, RIABiz – “This doesn’t seem that dissimilar from what most firms are doing. Advisors are able to grow their businesses quicker and more efficiently, if they aren’t concerned with investments 24/7.”
July 13, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Andrew Welsch and Jessica Mathews – Wells Fargo’s brokerage ranks continue to shrink, indicating that a long-running decline in advisor numbers has yet to come to an end. Louis Diamond, a recruiter at Diamond Consultants, who has worked with Wells Fargo, anticipates the number of advisors exiting will slow down.
July 12, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Michael Thrasher, WealthManagement.com – Janney Montgomery Scott, the regional broker/dealer based in Philadelphia that manages $80 billion in clients assets, hired 19 advisors and added another $3.1 billion in assets in the second quarter, keeping pace with its record growth at this time last year.
July 10, 2018 – Barbara Herman Quoted – By Thomas Coyle, Financial Advisor IQ – A recent state court ruling has cast doubt on a key provision of the Protocol for Broker Recruiting, putting more pressure on the already weakened advisor-recruiting agreement and erecting a new barrier in the form of “garden leaves” to FAs looking to take old clients to new firms, industry experts tell FA-IQ.
June 2, 2018 – Louis Diamond Quoted – By Tobias Salinger, Financial Planning – The number of financial advisors dropped by the largest independent broker-dealers has not exceeded the number gained in any of the past five years, in a signal that forecasts of shrinking head counts have not come to fruition. Advisors would still be wise to prepare for the belt-tightening, though.
