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TD Ameritrade Institutional has been the beneficiary of the breakaway broker trend as advisors flock to independence amid continuing regulatory worries.

Morgan Stanley reported better-than-expected sales and a smaller-than-expected loss in its second quarter Thursday, posting a loss of 38 cents a share on sales of $9.3 billion.

Hutchens Investment Management has merged with New Leaf Asset Management, with New Leaf executives Fletcher Cole and Carrie Bossi joining the Hutchens team.

While hedge funds-of-funds tout their diversification as a limit on risk, this is not the case, according to research by NYU Stern Finance Professor Stephen Brown and co-authors Greg Gregoriou and Razvan Pascalau of SUNY College at Plattsburgh School of Business and Economics. In extreme market conditions, the professors attest, a broadly diversified hedge fund-of-fund is actually more sensitive to risk than an average hedge fund.

BlackRock plans to get active in active ETFs, its chairman and chief executive said Wednesday.

Frank Williams Jr., who owns steel companies throughout the East Coast, took a controlling stake in Greater Atlantic Financial Corp., whose bank failed in late 2009. The shell has nothing to its name -- except for $30 million in operating losses.

William Bailey, formerly a broker with the NEXT Financial Group in Mesa, Ariz., has been put on the sidelines for two years by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for switching customers in and out of mutual funds, for average of two months per investment.

DST Systems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ALPS for $250 million in cash. Once the deal closes, which is expected in the fourth quarter, ALPS will be marketed as “ALPS, a DST Company.”

The 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are expected to increase their annual dividend payout by 12.66% from a year ago and 2.93% from the first quarter, according to a survey by Dow Jones Indexes.

Americans are showing resilience in the aftermath of the financial crisis, but their advisors report that they are not doing a good enough job of saving or living within their means, Principal Financial found in a survey of 632 advisors. Only 10% of the advisors surveyed said their clients are able to easily visualize their financial dreams.