Advisors archive
Every Advisors story, newest first. 861 stories
17 stories
- Practice management
Your firm's manual now decides which side gigs survive
The SEC narrowed what brokerages must monitor, kept the sales-compensation trigger, and left every firm to write the list that actually governs an advisor's outside business.
- Practice management
The SEC just gave examiners a checklist for your annual review
The annual compliance review now has a published yardstick — firms that treat it as paperwork will feel it first.
- Recruiting & transitions
Morgan Stanley raises the growth bar and bids for its own succession
The first 2027 wirehouse plan lifts production hurdles 10% and prices a 30-year advisor's exit above the top of its own payout grid.
- Succession & selling a firm
ESOP bill clears the House; exit advice gets a rulebook
The Retire Through Ownership Act gives advisers a named valuation standard for the ESOP route, changing how a founder's options stack up against a buyer's letter of intent.
- Tax & estate planning
Bonus depreciation is a timing trade worth pricing, not a windfall
The Tax Foundation's three corrections give advisors the arithmetic for a year-end purchase conversation, and a reason to stop calling the writeoff a permanent cut.
- Recruiting & transitions
Ameriprise's $1.3B exit is a custodian decision, priced at 25 basis points
The Minneapolis team kept its clients and its fee schedule; everything else it now rents from one custodian.
- Practice management
NASAA holds its $15 rep fee flat; the ledger is the cost
The firm-level IARD waiver now runs through 2027, which fixes the cheap part of state registration while the per-representative workload keeps growing.
- Practice management
Advisors want client time; AI is buying back emails
Vanguard's 72% time priority gives practices the benchmark for judging where AI belongs, and the survey's usage data shows most are still a layer away from the client-facing hours they say they want.
- Tax & estate planning
Clients asking for a simple estate plan want control, not fewer documents
The advisor's real deliverable is a plan the family can run, with a written record that the tradeoffs were chosen rather than discovered.
- Practice management
The 5% foundation payout floor is now a client audit trigger
Average payout at the largest private foundations was 5.1% in 2024, handing advisors a benchmark and a warning for private foundation clients.
- Tax & estate planning
The beneficiary's clock sets inherited-IRA RMDs
A Slott Report mailbag answer ties the inherited-IRA divisor to the beneficiary's age and the Roth five-year rule to the owner's original contribution date.
- Practice management
Ask what the decision solved before you call it a mistake
Kitces and Richards would have advisors rebuild a client's reasoning before they rebuild the portfolio; the answer is what justifies the rewrite.
- The Advisor's Note
The 401(k) now starts income before the rollover
BlackRock's default embeds guaranteed income and private assets, moving the fall's tax checkpoints after the income decision.
- Tax & estate planning
The October decisions that set the withdrawal rate
Three dated checkpoints — an excess 2025 IRA contribution, a federal healthcare subsidy that needs a stress case, and a fraud deduction the House voted to restore — show why the fall calendar moves the spending plan more than an allocation call does.
- Practice management
Healthcare's fiscal trajectory belongs in every decumulation model
The Tax Foundation's fiscal math argues for stress-testing federal healthcare subsidies and the employer-coverage exclusion the way advisors already stress-test equity returns.
- Recruiting & transitions
Osaic's rebuild starts with the advisors it still has
More than a thousand registered reps left in the year consolidation ended, and the terms a sitting Osaic advisor can still negotiate are the part of the story that pays.
- Practice management
Claude for advisors hits the workflow wall
The connectors are the proof of concept, and the practices that never wrote down a baseline will have no way to know whether the tool moved anything.
15 stories
- Practice management
Ridgeline’s $250M raise matters to advisors for who wrote it
An invitation-only round led by the founder buys the platform time to finish the reconciliation build its RIA clients have already signed up for.
- Practice management
RIA buyers have more capital than ever; holding period now wins deals
Eight ways to fund an RIA acquisition, and the one term that decides whether the seller's team survives it: the buyer's return model.
- Tax & estate planning
A fraud tax fix that lands at the decumulation desk
The House's 408-17 vote restores a deduction fraud victims lost in 2018; the penalty waiver and one-year repayment window are the pieces advisors can plan around.
- Recruiting & transitions
28 advisors kept an $825 million book by staying put
An OSJ's move reprices the practices inside it; the advisors who stayed just published the math for everyone else.
- Products & portfolios
Rescinding 14a-8 turns client proxy voting into state-by-state diligence
If adopted, the SEC's proposal moves the gatekeeping of shareholder proposals to state law, and advisors who vote client proxies will feel it in every ESG engagement.
- Products & portfolios
A 45.4% tax loss turns four of five tax fixes into a founder's playbook
Four of Financial Planning's five tax strategies presuppose a concentrated position, while the 1% drag everyone else pays is the harder problem to sell against.
- Practice management
SEC approves FINRA's outside-business rewrite and leaves firms the discretion that matters
Rule 3290 removes the paperwork on bartending and weekend refereeing and says broker-dealers need not supervise a dual registrant's RIA; how much of that relief survives is decided in each firm's compliance manual.
- Products & portfolios
BlackRock's tailored 401(k) default moves the income call earlier
If a plan's default already carries guaranteed income and private assets, the rollover stops being where the decumulation conversation starts.
- Practice management
FMG Suite bets the follow-up email is the growth bottleneck
Seven launch partners route meeting recaps and prospect intake through one API layer; the practices whose records already agree will benefit most.
- Tax & estate planning
The last penalty-free exit for 2025 IRA contributions closes Oct. 15
Unwind the 2025 IRA contribution by October 15, or the 6% penalty repeats annually for as long as the excess remains in the account.
- Succession & selling a firm
The RIA sale price hides in the owner's salary line
A buyer recast a seller's $1.5 million profit to $1.2 million in week six, and the missing $300,000 was the founder's own pay — the one add-back she never priced.
- The Advisor's Note
AI's five weeks come with an unquantified bill
The next split is between firms that can assure AI outputs and those that cannot.
- Products & portfolios
The alternatives shelf splits into $2.8B pooled funds and $18,000 SPVs
The September 15 Form D batch holds both ends of the private market, and the diligence that matters now sits on the wrapper, not the manager.
- Practice management
Legacy Positions Are Fiduciary Work, Billable or Not
Rich Chen's guest post for Kitces maps the traps that turn a new client's concentrated stock into an exam finding — and puts the fee question squarely back in the firm's lap.
- Recruiting & transitions
Merrill recruits again while Morgan Stanley makes a capacity pitch
Two wirehouses spent the same week describing opposite hiring strategies, and the difference tells advisors where a transition check is still on the table.
8 stories
- Practice management
AI hands back five weeks a year; the error rate stays unquantified
AssetMark's survey puts adoption at 85% and the time savings at four hours a week, but the error rate it leaves unquantified—and the compliance hurdle firms keep naming—will decide the practice economics.
- Tax & estate planning
Retirement income's 8% adoption rate hides a reserve fund problem
Vanguard's decumulation survey shows where the income conversation should start: with the reserve fund clients already think they are running.
- Products & portfolios
Crypto's Senate failure leaves advisers selling an asset with no statute
A 50-49 cloture loss kills the only bill that would have drawn a statutory line between digital commodities and digital securities, and the 403(b) trust-access rider that was riding on it needs a new vehicle.
- Tax & estate planning
The windfall that needs the most hours is often the smallest
The smallest windfall is often the one that needs the most hours; practices that schedule by asset size spend their scarcest resource on the client who needs it least.
- Practice management
Pave's $15M round prices advisor AI at the custodian layer
The advisory firms that wrote checks bought a cheaper portfolio-construction layer — and a position in the channel that sells it.
- Tax & estate planning
Protect the retirement floor before writing the tuition check
Tuition's inflation-adjusted climb is real but far flatter since 2010, and parents' retirement is the only side of the tradeoff with no way back.
- Recruiting & transitions
The UHNW recruiting pitch has stopped leading with the check
NewEdge's 22nd office adds $1.25 billion in client assets and eight people to a platform built for multi-generational books.
- Products & portfolios
The 10-year clears 5%, and cash becomes an active bet
With global benchmark yields at their highest since 2008, the default client allocation has become a duration position advisors have to defend.