Practice

For a financial advisor, social media can be a powerful new business development tool. Managed right, social media can connect your business to an almost unending stream of new and interested prospects. But to enjoy that kind of success, you have to take an active approach.

Liquidnet said its trading volume moved 2 percent ahead of last year, with an 18 percent jump in June.

So far so good. That’s the word from the Council of Institutional Investors, a non-profit association of pension funds, retirement funds, endowments and foundations, regarding the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed by Congress and signed into law a year ago this week.

For Jeff Rose, founder and chief executive officer of Alliance Wealth Management in Carbondale, Ill., one of the best ways to communicate with existing clients and to attract new ones is through his blog.

Americans' retirement expectations have changed dramatically in recent years. A vast majority now plan to live more frugally and delay retirement, SunAmerica Financial Group and Age Wave found in a survey of 1,001 people age 55 and older. Nonetheless, the majority are still confident they will be able to eventually retire.

City Index, a London firm that specializes in bets on the movements of financial spreads and contracts for difference, has adopted a new service for monitoring its risks within each trading day.

Implementing the Dodd-Frank Act was never going to be easy. While lawmakers generally acted like the fighting was finished when the law was signed on July 21, everyone knew it was just the beginning. At 2,300 pages, the law left most of the heavy lifting to some 30 different federal agencies, which had to write roughly 400 rules or studies, more than half of them not due until 2012 or later.

Since financial advice is a trust-based business, PR should play an important part of every advisor’s marketing plan. Having a good number of media mentions that show your professional character and business philosophy can really make a difference in how people perceive you and your potential value to them.

In a world where the minute, second and even millisecond that you pull the trading trigger can materially affect the return you get, managers of mutual funds too often are slow to buy when prices are rising and too fast when prices are dropping.

As unemployment numbers remain markedly high, the number of high-net worth individuals in the U.S. continued to increase in 2010, according to Capgemini’s 2011 U.S. Metro Wealth Index.