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Summary: Advisers spend a lot of time thinking about their growth strategies. Two years ago, when InvestmentNews fielded the 2012 InvestmentNews/Moss Adams Financial Performance Study of Advisory Firms, we identified a subset of firms that were deemed “top performers." These firms were defined as the top quartile of participants across a range of metrics including revenue growth, cost control and profitability. The study found that the fastest-growing and most profitable firms sometimes take an unconventional approach to their business models.
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Summary: The language of finance is complicated, and sometimes intentionally so. From the “turgid dialect” of Fedspeak to the intentionally tortured and complicated mouse print disclaimers on investment prospectuses, the industry embraces verbosity. So when a New York Times best-selling author appears on 60 Minutes to declare that the stock market is “rigged,” it stands in stark contrast to the usual hedging, sidestepping and equivocating.
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Summary: We now are facing the threat of a compromised fiduciary standard that will allow brokerage firms to conduct business as usual. We have seen the SEC issue reports that openly talk about accommodating the brokerage industry’s business model.
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Summary: Fidelity Institutional announced Wednesday that is has opened an intriguingly named “Office of the Future” on its Smithfield, R.I., campus. The office was designed with input from the Fidelity Center of Applied Technology to address macro technology trends that have the biggest impact on advisors in the near future: mobile, pervasive video, evolving interfaces, cloud computing, social media, big data and gamification.
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Summary: A financial adviser should never get caught off guard — or show surprise or resentment — when a client raises a question about fees. After all, surveys have shown that financial advisory fees are widely misunderstood. A 2011 study by Cerulli Associates Inc. found that 33% of investors did not know how they paid for investment advice, and 31% said they thought the advice they got was free.
