Fiduciary Rules

Can an investment advisor be a stakeholder company while also discharging its fiduciary obligation to clients?

The SEC’s form CRS fails consumers. CRS, meant to inform the public about BDs and RIAs, instead confuses everyone.

During his second inaugural address, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that America should serve its soldiers long after they were done serving it. Coming just weeks before final victory in a gruesome civil war that killed at least 750,000, his words would become the motto for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Depending upon the decisions advisors make in the near term, their practices will either be setup for monumental growth or inevitable decline.

Here are three reasons marketing will get harder for financial advisors next year and beyond. Yet the situation isn’t hopeless. You can adopt strategies that make your marketing easier even with the changes on the horizon.

Behind every advisor’s success story is a well-laid and executed plan, which starts with effective goal setting. Let’s see how this works in action.

We’re all salespeople in some sense, fiduciary financial advisors included.

There is no shortage of vocal advisors and observers ready and willing to dive into any conversation about how you should set your fees.

Last week’s off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Buffalo and Minneapolis bodes big trouble for the Biden administration. But overlooked was a report from state securities administrators stating, frankly, the opposite. The “states” supported administration efforts to strengthen the regulation of broker-dealers.

If you’re struggling to attract new clients, it’s because prospects have a difficult time differentiating you. Prospective clients face four realities that will overwhelm their decision-making process.

Here is my interview with Eric Negron, an advisor, about how he uses the Asset-Map software.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took paternity leave and, while he nested, the critics feasted.

Succumbing to pressure by industry lobbyists, the DOL has delayed the enforcement date of its recent fiduciary exemption ruling. Advisors and firms will have additional time to transition towards full compliance in 2022.

A new entrant in the battle to defeat distrust may surprise many: the U.S. Supreme Court. Three justices’ recent remarks offer a model for financial leaders.

The reason so many folks think they don’t need an advisor is because they had a bad experience with someone they thought was a financial planner who turned out to be nothing more than a salesperson.

Tom Giachetti counsels a confused and befuddled advisor (played by me, Bob Veres) who is seeking advice on common but complicated issues that have come up recently around the profession.

In addition to the robo-advisors discussed in Part I and Part II of our series, traditional investment companies, including Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, Schwab, and Merrill have developed their own robo-advisory services.

Recently there has been a backlash against ESG-based investing. Some of this backlash is on target; some of it is completely wrong. None of it, however, fully identifies the worst thing about the ESG industry.

To sound different, you must be different in a way that is obvious to your prospects. How can you position yourself to be incomparable from your competition? Let’s look at seven ways.

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem.

I am neither for nor against cryptocurrency. If someone wants to use their hard-earned fiat currency to buy bitcoin or ether, go for it. But when you buy cryptocurrency, you own nothing.

Fiduciary, from the Latin fiducia, means trust. In this article, I contemplate the promise of a new paradigm for earning investor trust.

The SEC has totally abandoned its consumer protection mission, which is clearly spelled out in the law, and has been for at least the past 81 years.

Money vigilance has a dark side. It can limit someone's ability to enjoy relationships, leisure, and fun.

My friend who works in an emergency room as a physician assistant recently told me that she’s ready to collapse.

Pooled employer plans (PEPs) are the latest 401(k) rage, but they can be an asset or a liability. The difference is in their qualified default investment alternative (QDIA).

The SEC’s view of investor trust rejects the underlying assumptions that financial advisors suffer from poor trust and that this lack of trust is a problem.

The retainer fee model is the perfect option to ensure that financial advisors and their clients are working towards a common goal for a successful investment strategy with no conflict of interest.

When do we stop hiding and start accommodating? When do we reach the point where we can attend in-person events, while masked and taking other reasonable precautions?

For a long time, it worked. Wealthy investors did, in fact, enhance their yield through the firm’s YES strategy – and they were hooked. But then the market crashed, and the honeymoon was over.

The SEC has launched a monumental rule-making effort to enact mandatory climate-risk disclosure; the goal is “consistency, comparability and reliability,” according to Chairman Gary Gensler. Let’s hope it succeeds and the same principles are applied to disclosing the roles and purposes of broker-dealers and investment advisors.

For almost three decades the acronym TAMP, for turnkey asset management program, has stuck. It’s time to kill it.

Looking back at my personal financial planning practice, there are some things I’ve done right and some mistakes I’ve made along the way.

Advisors are realizing that they don’t need to retire as soon as they expected.

Form CRS is under greater SEC scrutiny by the Biden administration. How advisors and broker-dealer representatives are compared matters. A review of a few major firms’ CRS is illustrative.

I’m hearing from advisors who are worried about the profession's evolution and whether smaller firms can survive. They feel small and helpless against the wave of consolidation.

I'm not a big fan of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement, which advocates extreme frugality to retire as early as age 30.

We buy stocks with a mind toward dividend sustainability and a history of payment hikes. This contrasts with normal bias toward dividend shopping, where one would simply buy the highest-yielding companies as though nothing else mattered.

Two Congressional chairs have authorized a review of target-date funds (TDFs). The last such review was in 2009, and all that changed was that risk increased. It would be a shame if this initiative failed to produce results.

You’ve probably gotten several client questions over the past few years about using their portfolio to invest in bitcoin. I’m here to tell you why they shouldn’t do that.

The SEC has a unique opportunity to redo form CRS to help investors and investment professionals better understand how broker-dealers and investment advisers differ.

When Congress passed the SECURE Act in 2019, it was with the noble intention of helping those Americans who work in small businesses plan for retirement.

Proponents of the fiduciary standard claim that it will lead to better financial outcomes for clients. But a new study of Canadian advisors, who resemble U.S.-based RIAs but do not adhere to a fiduciary standard, casts doubt on this assertion.

All the online calculators and software programs combined cannot replace a human in the financial planning world.

Who isn’t baffled by the continuing run-up in stock prices? Behavioral scientists. They explain that we have a host of biases that make us irrational. Here are the reasons that we have a stock market bubble, presented in two tables.

Adding “alpha” to client relationships may be easier through effective estate and tax planning than with investment manager selection or portfolio construction. Potential changes to the tax code illustrate many of those planning opportunities.

As someone who has completed transactions and has walked away from a number of others, getting a deal done is more complex than putting out a “for sale” sign.

Does the executor of an estate deserve to be compensated for that service? Absolutely.

Unless an investor has compelling reasons to maintain their concentrated position, they should liquidate that position and reinvest in a broadly diversified portfolio.

Stop ignoring client annuities, and consider not only how they can improve performance in your client’s portfolios, but also how you can leverage them to expand your capabilities and grow your business.

Being named an executor means taking on a part-time job. Often, executors have day jobs so the duties of being an executor happen during lunch hours, after work, and on weekends.

It is a particularly good time to invest in the commodities markets.

Should investors know that brokers are not advisors to customers?