Smile if you make more money than your friends.
Divorce Can Make You Happy, But Money Doesn’t
“Getting Wasted Key to Success on Wall Street”
Or so claims Mark Jeffries, a former equity salesman for Merrill Lynch and the author of The Art of Business Seduction. Jeffries, who wasn’t big on going out and getting faced, says he was canned partly because he didn’t carouse with his boss. Read the rest of this entry »
Ignore the Offspring of Your HNW Clients at Your Peril
Prepare your clients’ heirs to receive their inheritance; you’ll have a better chance of becoming THEIR financial advisor instead of just being mom and dad’s. Here are two facts that should scare any financial advisor: First, over 90 percent of heirs change advisors promptly upon receiving their inheritance. Second, 70 percent of those heir families lose their assets and family cohesion after receiving their inheritance. Read the rest of this entry »
Retail investors are still selling stock funds, buying bond funds
Retail investors are still selling equity funds, buying bond funds. http://bit.ly/alZV7Q
Credit Card Agreements Are 31 Pages. FAs, Welcome the New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
According to Overlawyered.com, a fabulous website by a Cato scholar, “Credit card agreements now average 31 pages long.” Read the rest of this entry »
Call It the “Sliced Bagel” Tax
There is an amusing item in the New York section of the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Albany is so hurting for cash that it is now enforcing a little-known tax on bagels . . . that is, if you slice a bagel, you pay around $0.08 in tax. Read the rest of this entry »
The Gub’ment Screws Up the Market’s Pricing Mechanism
That the gub’ment (say in your best Michigan militia accent) messes up the market’s pricing mechanism is nothing new. From rent control in New York City to the capital markets, legislators and gub’ment bureaucrats have a tendency to create uncertainty or else burden the private economy with all kinds of bad craziness, as Hunter Thompson would say. Read the rest of this entry »
SEC CHARGES STATE OF NEW JERSEY FOR FRAUDULENT MUNICIPAL BOND OFFERINGS
I love this missive from the SEC this afternoon. So, not only are politicians great at kowtowing to special interests and spending taxpayers money wastefully, they’re also right in there in decieving investors — right along with those Wall Street fat cats. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey, Alan Greenspan, Shut Up!
You’ve got to love John Stossel, the once liberal ABC news crusader against big business turned libertarian and who now has a show on Fox Business Network. On Reason magazine’s blog yesterday (Reason is a libertarian journal/website), Stossel elegantly — and quite convincingly — tells Alan Greenspan that he should keep his mouth shut. Read the rest of this entry »
Merrill’s Revamped Discount Brokerage, Good for Merrill but Bad for FAs?
Our cover story for August, Don’t Talk to Chuck: With its revamped discount trading platform, Merrill has, in effect declared open warfare on Chuck Schwab and its discount peers,” is starting to draw feedback. The article has been among our most viewed articles on our website since we posted it two weeks ago. And my phone is ringing. Read the rest of this entry »
