Practice

Sheryl Garrett says privately held firm or group, such as Vanguard or NAPFA, or a major benefactor, would be ideal match for her low-fee firm.

Many advisors are eager to find new clients, but not sure where to start. Dave Grant says prospective clients can turn up anywhere.

The Federal Reserve Board will be expanding its yearly stress-test exercise next year to include 11 more bank holding companies, bringing the total to 29 firms.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is proposing a new “execution-with-diligence” standard for municipal trading that would require a dealer to use “reasonable diligence” to determine the market for a bond so the price it provides to a customer is “fair and reasonable under prevailing market conditions.”

The group targeted companies that processed financial transactions and retailers that received and transmitted financial data.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision last month striking down the Defense of Marriage Act may have solved the estate tax problems of the lead plaintiff, Edith Windsor, but it still is leaving a lot of uncertainty among same-sex couples, particularly those in states that do not recognize same-sex marriage.

Advisors have some more competition brewing in the still-nascent online planning world.

Former UBS AG executive Peter Ghavami was sentenced to 18 months in prison for rigging what should have been competitive bids to handle municipal-bond investment deals.

Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against SAC Capital on Thursday. Dubbing SAC “a veritable magnet of market cheaters,” authorities argued that the company allowed a “systematic” insider trading scheme to play out between 1999 to 2010. It is deemed that the scheme generated profits for the firm in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Learning about the thinking patterns that you employ whenever you encounter difficult or challenging events is the first step in making life-altering changes in your thinking. Here are five examples of distorted thinking habits that advisors commonly face.