In the News

The Fight for Talent

00:00 01 November in In the News by rafferty

by Kristen French and featured in Registered Rep November, 2010: When the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney joint venture was announced in January of 2009, Scott Mowry and his team, all former Legg Mason advisors, knew they were not sticking around to see how it would turn out. The group had been looking into joining an independent b/d for two years. They'd been through one major takeover already, when Smith Barney scooped up Legg, and had given the culture of a big Wall Street firm a try. It wasn't the right fit. The hasty, desperate dealmaking, the bad mortgages on both firms' books, the ugly headlines and the TARP handouts, these things just pushed them over the edge. So when the MSSB retention pacakges landed on their desks, they didn't put their pens to...

Fee Changes May Mean More Fee-Based Accounts

00:00 10 July in In the News by rafferty

by Daisey Maxey and featured in Dow Jones Newswire July, 2010: (New York) - A proposal by regulators to limit and shed more light on mutual-fund distribution charges won't, for the most part, affect brokers' overall compensation but could encourage more fee-based advisory business. Even if brokers were to see the proposal as a threat, they aren't likely to raise many complaints. The changes, proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, would restrict funds' ongoing sales charges to the highest fee charged by the fund for shares that have no ongoing sales charge. For example, if one share class of a fund charges a 4% front-end sales charge, another class couldn't charge more than 4% in total to investors over time. Funds could continue to pay 0.25% per year out of their assets...

‘Marked’ Advisers Finding It Harder To Move

00:00 01 July in In the News by rafferty

by Daisy Maxey and featured in Dow Jones Newswire July, 2010: NEW YORK (Dow Jones) - Financial advisers with multiple blemishes on their records are finding it tougher to move from one broker-dealer to another these days. Not all that long ago, the new firm might look past an adviser's "marks" (for, say, selling an unsuitable investment to a client) if they brought a healthy book of business and a talent for recruiting clients. But in the post-crisis world of both heightened litigation and increased regulatory scrutiny, that isn't happening as often. Mindy Diamond, president of Chester, N.J.-based search firm Diamond Consultants, says, "We're living in a much more hyper-vigilant compliance culture where the appetite for advisers with marks (on their records) is much less than it has ever been before." Diamond said broker-dealers are...