Practice management

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.

Knight Capital Group said its earnings dropped by two-thirds in the second quarter, hurt by lower volume and volatility in stock trading.

When financial advisors are working with clients to figure out their retirement strategy, they need to factor in inflation into the mix. But the question is, how does one decide what inflation is likely to be years into the future when there are so many different ways to measure it even in the present?

State Street Corporation said it planned to reduce its technology staff by 850 employees, as part of a multi-year transformation of how it manages its information systems.

If you’re an advisor, you probably have a website. And you may belong to a social network such as LinkedIn or FaceBook. But to really make your website and social media efforts pay off, you’ll need to do more, experts say. The good news is that it’s not that difficult to strengthen your online presence -- and a stronger online presence can lead to more business. Here are eight tips for financial advisors to build a compelling online presence:

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.

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.

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.

The National Securities Clearing Corp. has developed a new automated service for clearing brokers to establish, monitor and update their relationships with broker-dealers for qualified special representative (QSR) and correspondent clearing transactions.

Schwab Advisor Services this week introduced a new software application called LaserApp that lets advisors automatically load new client data onto 80 different Schwab forms.

Employers are feeling confident about their financial futures and that means more new hires, fewer layoffs, and an increase in retirement benefits and reinstatements of certain benefits, according to the 12th Annual Transamerica Retirement Survey released on Tuesday.

While investors feel that some cautionary fences have gone up around the industry and some are more confident about working with financial advisors, the Dodd-Frank Act has not delivered substantial changes to the financial advisory industry since President Obama signed it into law almost a year ago.

Besides the standard questions about income, assets, debt, etc, what kind of questions do you ask to get to the core of your client's hopes and dreams? Do you ask them what scares them about retirement?

The incorporation of guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefits (GMWBs) into defined contribution plans may reduce the level of assets required for plan participants to achieve the same level of retirement income, according to Prudential Retirement.

A survey of more than a 1,000 Americans 55 and older found that three out of five still remain hopeful about the future and almost two-thirds say they would ideally like to remain productive and include some work in retirement.