Practice management

Access to advisors and brokerage accounts is getting even easier for some investors.

Growing a financial advisory practice comes with many challenges. From bringing in new assets to finding a work-life balance, these challenges consume much of an advisor’s time and attention. However, a challenge many advisors seem to ignore is also one that offers the most opportunity - hiring an associate wealth advisor.

Congress is scheduled to return Thursday, with one of its top priorities a deal to avert the December 31 “fiscal cliff” deadline of looming tax increases and automatic spending cuts, but it will need to work quickly or reach some type of interim agreement.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has ordered five firms to pay $4.48 million for unfairly using bond proceeds to pay reimburse themselves for membership fees they paid to the California Public Securities Association, a lobbying group.

Trades were placed one to two days after the orders arrived by fax or mail, causing some customers to get inferior prices from late 2003 until June 2011, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said in a statement.

Base salaries for hedge fund and mutual fund managers are projected to increase 3.5% and incentive pay is projected to rise by 0-10% from 2011 to 2012, according to a new study from Greenwich Associates and Johnson Associates.

Wealthy Americans say growing the economy matters more in the coming year than slashing federal spending.

“While many firms are definitely taking note of the importance of women today, they still don’t quite know how to approach women in a meaningful way,” says Teresa Dentino, founder and CEO of financial education firm The Financial 411.

After the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and continued calls for tighter scrutiny of the financial sector, 2012 brought a flurry of congressional hearings, public comments on rule proposals, and lobbying and public posturing by various stakeholders. Scores of new rules and regulations that could affect the advisory industry made their way through varying stages of development. But for all the noise this year, what actually changed?

President Obama, facing a budget stalemate with Republicans, urged leaders of both parties to assemble an interim bill to keep taxes from rising on middle- income Americans as they work on a more comprehensive plan.

Robert Khuzami, who led the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division’s pursuit of financial industry wrongdoing related to the subprime crisis, plans to step down as early as next month, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

President Obama is urging lawmakers to put together a package to avoid the fiscal cliff with the next 10 days.

"The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass," Boehner said in a statement after Republicans broke from a conference where leaders made a last-minute appeal for votes.

Ahead of two votes in the House of Representatives on Republican-backed spending and tax bills, Senate Democrats ripped into House Speaker John Boehner's so-called "Plan B," calling the proposals to avoid going over the fiscal cliff a "nonstarter" in the upper chamber and deepening the partisan impasse ahead of a year-end deadline to avert a series of automatic tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts.

ICE is smaller but more profitable. The combined company would operate globally, in trading of equities, futures, options, credit-default swaps, and interest-rate products as well as clearing.

TD Ameritrade Institutional has expanded the integration of leading advisor customer relationship management technologies (CRM) with its open access network, Veo.

Americans held $5 trillion in all employer-based DC retirement plans on September 30, of which $3.5 trillion was held in 401(k) plans, according to data from the Investment Company Institute.

One of the keys to attracting referrals is to be remarkable.

“Many banks are just going through the motions, tweeting about things that are irrelevant to their followers,” Ron Shevlin, an analyst with independent research firm Aite Group, writes in a recent report.

Speaker of the House John Boehner said Tuesday that House Republicans would introduce a bill to raise tax rates for millionaires as a “Plan B” in case his negotiations with President Obama on averting the fiscal cliff fail to produce an agreement.