Financial Planning magazine does the best job of all the magazines of collecting charts and data in the annual "broker-dealer survey" start-of-Summer ritual, and we see that this is a recovery year for the industry after two negative years in a row. True, the number of reps are down overall, but revenues are up a median 13.2%. These statistics also tell us, every year, that all the talk about "fee-based" services is mostly talk; the majority of revenues at all but a very few BDs are earned through commission sales, and the average assets under management in most systems is extremely low compared with the average fee-compensated advisor. The coverage is not perfect; why are insurance and brokerage BDs mixed in with independents, rather than given their own category rankings? This one change alone would have given us a much clearer look at the state of the industry.
You can see major trends in the profession being shaped through the profile of Richie Lee in Dallas and the Blue Ocean Marketing article, and Pamela Christensen's article on preplanning services (chiefly budget and debt planning) will be interesting to any advisor interested in taking on clients who have high cash flow but little in the way of investable assets. Finally, I thought this was the best article by Craig Israelsen in years--about how to select funds based on their value-added in the rebalancing process.
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