Ann Marsh

For many planners with high-net-worth minimums for their clients, target-date funds don’t make sense for a variety of reasons. But in the right circumstances, they can be helpful tools.

As banks nationwide struggle to process troubled assets off their books, middle market companies have not been able to get the loans they need to grow. Private money is stepping in to fill that gap – and providing yields that planners are seeking for their HNW clients.

Financial planner Ed Guanill is joining author and RIA Keith Springer at his Sacramento, Calif.-based firm, Springer Financial Advisors.

Going forward, investment advisors will no longer be able to include the value of an investor's home in a new $1 million minimum of investable assets now required to charge performance fees, according to the SEC, which is tightening its rule around fees.

To help busy advisors increase the frequency with which they contact clients, Cetera recently launched a new online marketing solution, Connect2Client. It’s designed to enable advisors to send out emails, paper postcards, newsletters with in-depth articles and a variety of messages, including birthday greetings, on a regular basis.

Planner, author and New York Times blogger Carl Richards, founder of Prasada Capital Management, has joined St. Louis-based BAM Advisor Services as its director of investor education.

The global effort by the U.S. government to catch American tax cheats intensified this week as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom agreed to support a broad new U.S. law requiring foreign financial institutions to disclose information about the foreign bank accounts of U.S. citizens.

In an address to a peer group of high-net-worth investors in New York City, George Soros told the audience that he would have little to say to cheer them about the state of the global economy.

With a projected valuation of as much as $100 billion, Facebook’s imminent IPO may portend great things for social media. But many planners feel less bullish about its prospects for delivering investment returns.

Hatteras Funds CEO Brian Jacobs predicts there will be an increasing convergence between the mutual fund and hedge fund worlds as more companies seek to offer hedge fund strategies to mass-market investors.

Organization wants to dispel 'conventional wisdom that it's a solution in search of a problem.'


A media shy financial advisor in Silicon Valley, Divesh Makan of Iconiq Capital, stands to bring in a potentially historic haul of new assets under management when Facebook launches its long-anticipated IPO.

Brian Saltzman, formerly with AllianceBernstein in New York City, has joined Neuberger Berman Group LLC as a wealth advisor and vice president in the firm’s Manhattan office.

Michael Hamm has left a position as vice president at Cambridge Investment Research in Fairfield, Iowa, to become a senior vice president at The Legend Group in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

Here's a an early preview of Financial Planning’s February cover story examining the savviest strategies that top planners and other financial professionals are using to put the fix back into their clients’ fixed income.

New M&A data from Schwab seems to suggest that the RIA space is not consolidating as fast as some have predicted it would – though the final analysis depends on how you define consolidation.

The wealth management industry is adjusting to clients who increasingly expect that they should have anytime, anywhere access to their account information via mobile applications, according to a new study.

Columbus, Ohio-based Beacon Hill Fund Services announced their first customer for its new Advisors Investment Trust product. The product enables multiple unaffiliated registered investment advisors to co-exist in the same registered investment company.

To not only survive, but thrive in 2012 and beyond, planners need to do two tricky things exceptionally well simultaneously: reduce expenses and increase their technology and mobile capabilities to engage younger, tech savvy clients.

As tax time approaches, many clients are wondering what to do with their most highly appreciated assets. If they are charitably minded, those assets can be converted into reliable streams of income through charitable trusts.