Edelman hires dealmaker to buy and recruit retirement practices
Edelman's new retirement-plan chief can buy your firm, hire your team, or grow around you — a trio of options for practice owners.
Story archive
All Wealth Advisor Daily reporting, newest first.
Vanguard's customizable models test the low-cost promise
Advisors get a way to tailor models for client-specific constraints. The low-cost structure holds only if the customization stays bounded.
Cerulli sees advisers' private-market assets nearly doubling
A projected $2 trillion increase puts interval funds, model portfolios, and fee tradeoffs at the heart of RIA allocation.
Self-directed investors still hire advisers, Betterment survey finds
Betterment's survey numbers turn clients' own research and AI experiments into an opening for advisers.
13 OECD countries tried wealth taxes. Most repealed them.
The Tax Foundation's scorecard gives advisors a concrete baseline for a familiar client question.
Prop 40's wealth tax has a property-tax problem
The Tax Foundation's constitutional analysis gives advisors a specific legal risk to discuss with clients before the November vote.
MissionSquare's wealth push hands public-plan advisors a rollover rival
The plan provider behind $73.6 billion in public-sector assets is adding brokerage and robo accounts, competing for rollovers and household money.
Proposed rules map employer contributions to Trump Accounts
Advisors get their first concrete look at how employers can contribute — and where the plan can go wrong.
Mark Cuban and Ro Khanna spar over wealth-tax loans
The dispute gives advisors a concrete opening to raise liquidity and domicile questions with founder clients who are wealthy on paper.
MAI's $1B double buy lands two RIAs on a Carlyle-backed platform
The acquisition puts two planning-heavy RIAs under a Carlyle-backed umbrella, changing the ownership math for their advisors.
Nonqualified deferred compensation takes over at the 401(k) ceiling
A niche plan for key employees gives fee-pressured advisors a product with no menu price.
Europe's wealth taxes split over what counts as wealth
A Tax Foundation map of Europe's 2026 wealth taxes shows Norway, Spain and Switzerland taxing total net wealth, while France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands hit only certain assets.
Schwab's 2025 RIA Benchmarking Study gives firms a yardstick
The 1,288-firm survey sets a comparative baseline for growth, pricing, and staffing. The data are self-reported and limited to Schwab-custodied firms; treat them accordingly.
California's billionaire tax leaves a ten-month residency gap
Advisors should ask California clients about domicile before the January 1 snapshot locks in.
NASAA tallies 1,650 senior-abuse probes as deepfake scams rise
The enforcement count hands RIA principals a number and a date to raise with clients.
The last mile of retirement is a spending problem
A new IRIC white paper makes the case for building spending permission into the plan, rather than hoping clients find it on their own.
A missed after-tax election costs 40 percent unless caught early
EPCRS prices a skipped after-tax election at 40 percent of the missed amount; a plan can dodge the charge by opening a nine-month make-up window.
The Labor Department's lost-and-found database locates forgotten retirement plans
The SECURE 2.0 search tool gives advisors a fresh annual-review ritual — just don't mistake a match for a payout.
NASAA cuts retest wait to 60 days after a third failure
Failed candidates can retake the exam four months sooner.
The Foreman Rial Group's wirehouse jump is a pricing lesson
The Foreman Rial Group's move to Morgan Stanley shows what a lift-out check must cover — and the risk the advisors take on.
One in eight active large-cap funds beats the index over a decade
A one-in-eight decade-long win rate demands a written thesis for every active large-cap sleeve.
A $14 million Merrill team jumps to Rockefeller in Ohio
The hire extends Rockefeller's run of wirehouse recruits and puts a 43-year Merrill veteran on a family-office platform.
Finra proposes a ten-day pause on suspicious account moves
Brokerages would gain a ten-day window to stop fraud. Advisors would need to explain the pause to a client.
FINRA proposes fresh list when arbitrator selections fail
A rule filing would replace random substitutions with a new list when the first round of arbitrator picks falls short.
A 35-day round trip shows the risk in a wirehouse transition
David Powell left Morgan Stanley for RBC and was back in a month. The episode is a lesson in what a shared book means for a transition package.
Active's losing decade turns advice into the product
Morningstar's scoreboard gives advisors a defensible reason to sell planning and tax work instead of fund picks.
Cerulli: One in Four Retiring Advisors Face Succession Uncertainty
With a third of advisors set to retire in the next decade, succession-ready talent will decide who sells on their own terms.
The out-spouse is a planning client, not a bystander
The great wealth transfer will be won in the couple meeting, where the out-spouse often sits quietly.
Medicare's $50 GLP-1 bridge lands in the retirement budget
Roughly 4 million Part D beneficiaries qualify for Medicare-covered weight-loss drugs at $50 a month. The program ends in 2027.
Beneficiary forms and titles trump the will
The will says who gets what. The beneficiary form says who actually gets it. When they disagree, the form wins.
Your website is the source ChatGPT cites most
Advisor-controlled pages account for 45% of ChatGPT's citations when it recommends an advisor, according to a new study.
Retire SMART's $800M book: 25% of revenue into marketing
An Omaha RIA built its book organically by treating educational marketing as a line item.
Four retirement paths beyond the full-time countdown
Introduce financial independence, sabbaticals, Coast FIRE, and semi-retirement early, and the default exit date becomes a deliberate choice.
Vibe-coded tools are building on top of the advisor stack
A new Nerd's Eye View analysis finds that most advisor-built AI tools are supplements to existing platforms, not substitutes — and the build-versus-buy math has shifted less than the hype implies.
A three-person team runs $240 million on a meeting agenda
A two-sided meeting agenda, refined over 20 years, is the system behind a $240 million practice.
The client's gut is financial data
Kitces & Carl episode 196: feelings belong in the plan, not just the spreadsheet.
Most of the $124 trillion transfer lands with women
Seventy percent of women have never met an advisor; the first meeting is where the transfer's largest client block will be won.
YCharts folds Zephyr SMA data into proposals; Advyzon ships AI suite
Two upgrades inside existing platforms push RIAs to test built-in features against the tools they already run.
Why the client who agrees to sell still won't sell
A Kitces.com guest post separates the endowment effect into loss aversion, identity, and anchoring. Logic won't cure any of them.
Two failed successions later, Kahler Financial sold to an accounting firm
Rick Kahler watched two hand-picked successors walk away before selling his RIA to a local accounting firm. A case study in making failure survivable.
FINNY prices marketing on a share of the assets it wins
A $50 monthly platform fee plus a 20-basis-point asset charge makes marketing a recurring cost of growth.
Custodian's checking overhaul leaves clients with unequal cash protections
Advisors need to map which guarantee sits behind each cash balance as a Westlake, Texas custodian keeps the savings from an investor checking revamp.
Franklin Templeton packages private markets into model portfolios
A single-subscription wrapper brings Franklin Templeton's private-markets models into the standard advisory workflow. The tax treatment will determine whether the SMA-style label holds up.
Fund launches test advisors on the wrapper and its fees
A round of ETF and alts launches puts wrapper structure and fee disclosure at the center of advisor due diligence.
Edward Jones's $5,000 digital pilot takes aim at the next generation
A salaried remote advisor and a 0.65% fee give the 20,500-broker firm a product for clients too small for a branch relationship.
RIAs push trust and estate in-house despite a thin advisor bench
The services are moving in-house faster than the advisor expertise to staff them, survey data suggest.
LPL's road to 90% retention runs through smaller Commonwealth books
The commitment rate sits in the low 80s and is lopsided: larger, faster-growing Commonwealth teams have signed, so the 90% target depends on smaller practices.
ETF glut passes the stock count, forcing a stricter screen
Four new funds arrive every business day. Advisors running model portfolios need a screening process that runs on a schedule.
Vanguard opens four model portfolios to outside fund choices
RIAs can now replace Vanguard funds with outside managers in four of its model portfolios, with Orion, Black Diamond and Vestmark doing the overlay work.
IBD Elite 2026 ranks 37 brokerages; clearing costs stay hidden
The annual revenue ranking gives advisors a rare public measure of brokerage scale; a companion feature explains why clearing and custody costs stay hidden.