Some advisors find outside assets near 20% of client wealth

A portion of a client's assets can sit outside the advisory relationship entirely, in a non-advisory brokerage account at the same firm or at another institution, WealthManagement.com reported. A legacy mutual fund position, a handful of individual securities, equity compensation or an annuity purchased years ago often predates the relationship and was never folded into it.

Assets in advisory accounts get an allocation strategy, a rebalancing cadence and regular review. The non-consolidated assets may be reviewed less frequently and are easier to overlook in the context of the client's overall picture, according to the report.

The column's author writes that outside assets can represent a larger portion of a household's balance sheet than initially expected. A few advisors who asked clients directly found the figure considerably higher, in some cases closer to 20%, according to the column. Clients aren't ignoring held-away accounts on purpose, the author writes; they are often just not thinking about them.

Most investors leave those accounts alone. Twenty-five percent of investors made no trades in their non-retirement accounts over the past year, according to the FINRA Investor Education Foundation's 2024 Investor Survey cited in the column. Another 31% traded one to three times, meaning more than half made three or fewer trades.