Bob Veres

Want to insulate your firm from future crises? A few moves look sure to offer a payoff whether equities soar, plunge or just muddle along.

In which the author takes a pair of popular assessments and finds he’s not as daring as he thought he was.

A set of mid-1990s recommendations aimed to reform Wall Street's culture. They didn't, however -- and the real losers were investors.

Planners are facing another competitive attack. Previous threats made the profession stronger - will that happen this time?

A growing band of advisors is charging their clients purely for advice. Here's why you should be paying attention.

High-speed trading isn’t such a big problem for investors - but the underlying structure of the U.S. financial markets just might be.

Independent planners can not win a battle against Wall Street unless they find a way to defeat well-funded lobbyists in the industry.

The hyper-partisan nature of this last Presidential election was guaranteed to create a long, unhappy hangover for half of the American population, and it created a particular challenge for financial planners and investment advisors. Billions of dollars were spent to tell investors and clients that America is going to hell in a handbasket. People were emotionally invested in the outcome

Financial Planning columnist Bob Veres says advisors need to understand what could happen if FINRA becomes their regulator.

While the recent FPA Convention provided some new and very interesting presentations and introduced some pretty high-brow concepts, Financial Planning columnist Bob Veres felt far too many of the presentations were bogged down by speakers who decided -- or were compelled -- to “dumb down” the material to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What did you think?

Ahead of next month’s Business & Wealth Management Forum in Chicago, it’s time to start asking some big-picture questions. For example, how could our profession have a bigger political impact than we do today and if there are better ways to add value than simply tending client portfolios?

I think we all know that the financial planning profession is drowning in paperwork and the problem is only going to get worse. This vexing -- and increasing -- compliance hassle is generating a certain amount of frustration in the profession, and most of the people I talk with don't know where to turn. So who speaks for the planner?

Make no mistake. We are going to sail through a lot of these volatile periods over the next five to 10 years and the profession needs to brainstorm better ways to deal with them that won't harm clients and their investment goals. We need to better understand what's going on. And consumers deserve to be told more than just which way the wind is blowing today.

How do you talk to your clients about the debt ceiling and budget battles when so many people are strongly -- perhaps not always rationally -- on one side or the other of the political divide? Suddenly, loss of confidence in our country's legislative and executive leadership is driving loss of confidence in the markets and it seems the two are now linked in ways that we may never have seen before.

I think we as advisors are going about our lobbying effort all wrong. More to the point: does it make sense for us to keep lobbying on behalf of the consumer or should we act like everybody else in the universe and lobby for things that would better serve our own interests?

Lately, I've seen more and better thinking about asset management than you could find in the previous 20 years in the profession and I think it may be time to give modern portfolio theory a makeover. In fact, I think this fits a long-standing historical pattern.

I may be opening up an old wound here, and if I am, I hope you'll forgive me. But I find myself wondering about all the ways that the interests of a broker-dealer differ from the interests of its affiliated advisors. I've never seen this explored anywhere.

I have a lot of pet peeves but one of my biggest is how we, as a profession, tend to define other professionals by one number: their assets under management.

To me, the most interesting event of the year, so far in the financial planning space, is the Schwab organization's new Independent Branch Services initiative. The gist of it is that Schwab's retail division is looking for experienced advisors to come in and transform their practices into Schwab branch offices on a franchise basis.

I guess if you wait long enough, everything that once was will come back to us again. Even the bad stuff.