Practice management

UBS has hired Louise F. Gunderson as a new managing director of investments for its midtown New York office.

It seems we have reached the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of regulatory efficiency. If the SEC is spending weeks on trivial issues and completely missing Bernie Madoff then it is clear that something is seriously broken.

In the past year, TD Ameritrade’s mobile trading has increased by 125%.

A MassMutual Retirement study found that women put their retirement assets in target-date options twice as often as risk-based options in the fourth quarter of 2010, while men were just as likely to use a target-date fund as they were a risk-based one.

Advisor-owned firm HighTower has expanded its advisor force with the addition of four Merrill Lynch veterans in Portland, Maine.

After years of absorbing one punishing body blow after another as the market continued its free fall, affluent investors are finally starting to regain their confidence and invest accordingly, according to a new survey from Spectrem Group

More than half say they’ll buy stocks in 2011

Customer relationship management is more than just an industry buzzword. In fact, for advisors it can be the difference between a profitable business and a really profitable business.

How you assess the banking industry's health from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s latest earnings report may depend on which page you turn to.

Dodd-Frank contains a series of ambitious deadlines requiring regulators to complete 170 or so new rules by July. But it's become clear the agencies are going to miss many targets.

The St. Louis brokerage company continues to its slow-but-steady growth with new addition in Connecticut.

This comes shortly after seven other FA’s joined MSSB.

A Florida retiree who gave her Wachovia broker a second chance "to do a better job" with her IRA investments has filed claim against Wells Fargo after suffering losses, again.

Curian Capital found that 62% of advisors say that improving efficiency and overall time management is a major goal for the coming year.

Just as the market volatility of the last few years has been challenging for investors, it’s also been challenging for advisors. In addition to the higher level of effort required to keep nervous and frustrated clients on the books, high volatility in client accounts makes it harder to be confident of fee-based revenue and therefore confident of a practice’s overall financial health.

A report released by Pershing suggests that while most wirehouses and independent broker-dealers recognize that their core advisors are aging and will soon need to be replaced, few have done much in the past three years to address the problem.

Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly important to wealth managers and their clients, but a new survey released by Advisors Trusted Advisor makes it clear that old-fashioned word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool for financial advisors and their firms.

Five "psychographic" categories can help to give advisers a handle on their clients and potential clients, but they can also provide some reassurance to baby boomers

Funding consideration were part of the reason that the SEC decided to shift oversight of smaller advisors to states. With soaring deficits, how will the states handle the added responsibility of supervising financial advisors?

Senior ranking brokerage operations and operational risk executives beware: the Securities and Exchange Commission says the buck now stops with you when it comes to proving you have sound procedures in place.