The broker attrition at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC is slowing down, according to Charles Johnston, its president and chief operating officer.
The following is an edited transcript of the round-table discussion. It was moderated by <i>InvestmentNews</i> deputy editor Evan Cooper and reporter David Hoffman.
They used to ride desks and flog stocks, but now some Wall Street refugees are choosing to walk a beat and chase bad guys.
Big bonuses could be back in store for some top executives and traders on Wall Street as profitability returned to the investment banking industry in 2009, according to a new study released Thursday.
The number of financial advisers fleeing large brokerages appears to be slowing, as many wirehouse reps are staying put — for now — or joining another wirehouse.
Beacon Pointe Advisors of Newport Beach, Calif., a wealth management firm with $4 billion in assets that caters to high-net-worth individuals, is looking to bolster its business with wirehouse castoffs.
A prominent wirehouse rep and his Hawaii-based team — <a href= http://www.investmentnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090929/FREE/909299980&ht=choy>who rather suddenly left</a> Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. in September — have formed a new advisory firm.
A former broker at Prudential Securities Inc. charged with fraudulently trading mutual funds for millions of dollars in commissions has been sentenced to two months in a halfway house.
The Charles Schwab Corp. said its campaign to help wirehouse brokers become independent investment advisers is picking up speed at summer's end.
An estimated $800 billion in total client assets will be transferred across the investment advisory industry because of brokers and advisers' changing firms this year, according to a study from Cerulli Associates Inc.
The consolidation and regulatory changes facing the wirehouse brokerage industry is proving to be a bonanza for David A. Noyes & Co., an advisory firm that recently added six veteran financial advisers to its ranks.
The number of advisers moving from one wirehouse to another reached a nine-month low last month, according to data compiled by the Discovery-RR Database.
Aggressive hiring by regional broker-dealers is likely to continue for the rest of the year, coming mostly at the expense of the wirehouses, according to industry executives and analysts.
Kenneth Lewis, Bank of America Corp.'s embattled chief executive, gave a trenchant analysis of the state of banking — and the brokerage business, in particular— last week when he announced that former Smith Barney boss Sallie Krawcheck will run the bank's global wealth and investment management sector.
Aggressive hiring by regional broker-dealers is likely to continue for the rest of the year, coming mostly at the expense of the wirehouses, according to industry executives and analysts.
Wirehouses lost approximately $1.5 trillion worth of market share last year, according to a report from Cerulli Associates Inc. of Boston.
The chief driver of satisfaction, according to the study, is the financial adviser, comprising 30% of the total — an increase from 22% in 2008. In contrast, investment performance declined in importance — accounting for only 15% of overall satisfaction, compared with 24% in 2008.
Even though independence is losing its stigma as a sign of failure among wirehouse brokers, they continue to move at only a moderate pace to independent broker-dealers and registered investment advisory firms, a panel of experts said last week.
Assets in broker-managed ac-counts reached the levels of traditional wrap fee accounts in the first quarter of the year, a milestone in the fee-based business at major brokerage firms.
The steady exodus of registered reps from wirehouses is expected to accelerate dramatically over the next 18 months, according to a report from TowerGroup.
