Practice management

Baird has tapped three new professionals from the Gawelski Group to bring its Milwaukee wealth management group to 69 total.

First Republic Bank, a San Francisco private banking and wealth management firm, announced Monday it hired Lucas Newman and Michael Tinney as portfolio managers and managing directors for First Republic Private Wealth Management in Portland, Ore.

"We welcome the clarity that the January SEC Staff Report brings to the retail financial advice industry,” said Mark Casady, LPL’s chairman and CEO. “ In particular, we agree with the report's recommendation for a uniform fiduciary standard, as we believe this is right for investors, financial advisors and the industry.”

The White House's removal of Joseph Smith as a nominee to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency does not bode well for an administration facing so many regulatory jobs to fill, observers said Friday.facing

The National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States cast blame wide and far, in releasing its report Thursday on the causes of the 2008-2009 financial crisis. But not once in the 662-page report did high-frequency traders come up.

The Investment Management Consultants Association announced that the cumulative pass rate for its CIMA qualification exam was 63% and the for the CIMA certification exam was 58%.

There seems to be a lot of "energy" (and sometimes anger) around the idea that some people provide full-service financial planning and some people call themselves planners while actually selling products or managing assets for a living.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Bart Chilton told insittutional investors Wednesday that opponents of changes wrought by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act are trying to block implementation of resulting rules by starving regulators of funding.

The U.K.’s Financial Services Authority fined the firm $1.77 million on Wednesday, bringing its total fines against the firm this month to $13.97 million.

Companies are not following the leads of consumers. In the enterprise, Apple’s iPad tablets and iPhone smartphones are gaining ground against mobile devices based on Google’s Android operating system. And the biggest adopters of iPads and iPhones are financial services firms, according to a new activation report.

The Spectrem Affluent Investor Confidence Index rose five points in January.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Long Island investment adviser with defrauding his customers a total of $8 million after inflating the value of their holdings through a practice called cross-trading.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Michael V. Dunn said Wednesday that the regulator cannot fulfill all its new duties under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act unless it gets more funding.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act faces a “serious threat” and “potential undoing” ­under Republican-proposed spending cuts, House Democrats warned Tuesday.

There’s a buyer for you out there. Here’s what you need to consider for 2011.

In a narrow 3-2 vote today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has green lighted a provision that will give shareholders a say on the executive pay at companies they have a substantial stake in.

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, now a unit of Bank of America, will pay $10 million to settle charges that it misused customer order information for its own proprietary trading in securities.

Private fund advisors with more than $1 billion in assets under supervision have a greater need for monitoring, especially after lessons learned during the recent financial crisis, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged an Austin energy company with bribing a broker to manipulate the price of its stock.

Advisor David Armstrong combines technology, legal oversight and common sense to make the most of online communication tools.