UBS’s Wealth Management Americas division is aiming to bolster the Swiss bank’s brokerage, internally announcing significant management changes on top of a substantial reorganization: It consolidated three brokerage regions into two, and it named Jason Chandler as the new head of private wealth management, Registered Rep. learned exclusively on Friday....
The New York Attorney General’s office today charged Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis with fraud for failing to disclose material details about Merrill Lynch in its merger with the brokerage. The move takes the case one step further than the SEC did: The SEC charged only the bank itself rather than individual corporate officers. Financial services lawyers say there may be more bad news for Lewis down the line. ...
Bank of America plans to add 2,000 new brokers in 2010, mostly trainees. One analyst says Merrill may want these hires to help with BofA’s cross-selling efforts. ...
Fidelity announced the latest in a series of price cuts Tuesday. But the move has less to do with an ongoing price war between itself and Schwab than with the firm’s decision to eliminate discrepancies between pricing offered to its RIA clients and to its retail clients. ...
Will the regulatory push for a uniform fiduciary standard die on the vine? Brokers may not be best equipped to predict regulatory outcomes, but most of them do not expect such a standard to be implemented, according to survey results released today by Aite Group. ...
If you visit William Mundy at his Blue Bell, Pa. office, chances are good you’ll find him with his ear pressed to the phone, pitching his services to people he’s never met: That’s right, cold calling. ...
Eager to raise cash and get out from under taxpayer loans, PNC Financial Services Group is looking to sell its custody and clearing division, PNC Global Investment Servicing to Bank of New York Mellon. ...
The dismal morale among UBS brokers seems to be improving of late. A number of top financial advisors at the firm say that they are so far very pleased with the leadership of UBS Wealth Management CEO Bob McCann, and the team of people he has brought on board. ...
Thanks to Chairwoman Mary Schapiro, if your clients' money market funds are threatening to break the buck, the board of the fund may elect to suspend redemptions....
Charles Goldman, the president who oversaw Fidelity Investments’ services for financial advisors, will leave at the end of March, the second top manager in a week to depart from the mutual fund giant. Also exiting Fidelity is the company’s President Rodger Lawson, the number two executive under Chairman and CEO Edward “Ned,” Johnson. Lawson leaves at the end of March as well....
A recent study says says it paid to use fundamental indexing in the decade of The Aughts. Rather than losing money, you would have earned a small return. ...
Affluent investors rated Charles Schwab the number one “distributor” or brokerage firm, bumping Fidelity into second place, according to Cogent Research’s recently released 2010 Investor Brandscape report. ...
Neither Morgan Stanley Smith Barney nor Bank of America ended 2009 with a bang in the earnings department. But their wealth management units were pockets of strength....
I don’t get it. I thought Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said the government would earn -— as in profit —- from its TARP loans about $20 billion. So why all this nonsense about punitively taxing bankers’ bonuses and massive new taxes on big financial institutions to recoup taxpayer bailouts? For more, please go to VonAldo.com, the blog of Registered Rep. Editor-in-Chief David A. Geracioti...
Wells Fargo financial advisors received their first paychecks last Friday under the firm’s new tax withholding system, which applies a flat rate of 25 percent to all. Many of the firm’s 12,000 financial advisors have grumbled to management about the switch, which will be in place until 2011 as the firm works to integrate legacy payroll systems from Wells Fargo and Wachovia. ...
On Monday, Citigroup filed a motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit filed against the firm over the terms of its financial advisor bonus pay agreements. The firm filed the motion with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. ...
It’s earnings season, and consensus analysts’ estimates are predicting a 184.2 percent jump in earnings for the S&P 500 companyies in Q4 over a year ago. Obviously, Q4 earnings have an easy bogey, since Q4 2008 earnings were pathetic. The rebound in Q4 earnings will be driven by financial, analysts say. For more, go to VonAldo.com, the blog of Registered Rep. Editor-in-Chief David A. Geracioti...
Each December analysts at Raymond James pick a list of stocks its will likely “produce above-average price appreciation over the next 55 weeks.” This year’s list contains 14 stocks that Raymond James analysts say should somehow outperform despite “expected relative slow recovery of the U.S. economy” in 2010. For more, go to VonAldo.com, the blog of Registered Rep. Editor-in-Chief David A. Geracioti...
Talk about optimism. Consensus analysts’ earnings estimates for S&P 500 companies for 2010 are now at $77.61 per share—that’s a 30.5 percent jump over 2009 estimated earnings, ThomsonReuters said Friday in its weekly “This Week in Earnings” report. For more, please go to Registered Rep. Editor-in-Chief David A. Geracioti's blog, VonAldo.com...
More proof of the breakaway broker phenomenon, albeit anecdotal? Moneta Group has hired two veterans legacy A.G. Edwards advisors, the company said today, amid a nascent national trend of advisors leaving wirehouses for smaller independents....
Family teams are common in the wealth management industry and getting more so. Hiring family members can be an easy solution to finding a trustworthy
partner and a successor. But there are drawbacks.
