By Kenneth Corbin
Jay Clayton is a familiar face on Wall Street. The veteran corporate lawyer chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission under the first Trump administration, and now he is poised to return as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the high-profile field office of the Justice Department with criminal jurisdiction over Manhattan. Trump's nominee to head SDNY has no prosecutorial experience but is a well-respected and amicable lawyer who is expected to focus on bread-and-butter criminal matters rather than high-profile cases against large Wall Street firms.
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Robinhood's wealth management play. Born as a free stock-trading app, Robinhood Markets is moving toward more of a full-service wealth management model with the purchase of TradePMR, which provides a variety of tools and services to registered investment advisor firms, including custody and portfolio management. The acquisition, valued at around $300 million, is a significant step forward for Robinhood in its efforts to diversify its business model. TradePMR provides services to 350 firms and counts more than $40 billion in assets under advisement.
How to play the Bitcoin surge. With an incoming administration that is been talking about boosting digital assets and Bitcoin prices at an record high, many advisors are getting questions about how to play crypto these days. Advisors generally have advocated caution in recent years when it comes to digital assets, but with the recent tailwinds, we checked in with a handful of experts in this week's Barron's Advisor Big Q feature. Their views still vary, though they acknowledge that crypto remains a highly speculative and volatile asset class, with some recommending against it altogether and others suggesting modest allocations, with a short-term view in mind.
The value of coaching clients. In an industry defined by quantifiable metrics, how do you measure the value of sound financial advice? Vanguard has put a lot of time and research toward the question, and pegs the value of working with an advisor at about 3% over time, well above any fee pegged to a percentage of a client's assets. That is according to Maria Quinn, senior advice strategist at Vanguard's Investment Advisory Research Center, who recently joined Barron's The Way Forward podcast to discuss behavioral coaching, the $84 trillion wealth transfer already under way, and more.
LPL advances insurance platform. LPL Financial scored a big win when it clinched a deal with Prudential Financial to provide a wealth management platform for Prudential's 2,800 financial advisors. That was last August. Now, after pouring $300 million into building out the LPL Enterprise platform and onboarding Prudential's advisor force, the firm says it is looking to capture more of the $1.5 trillion market of insurance companies looking for support with their wealth management arms. LPL already provides institutional wealth management services to banks and credit unions, but insurance companies are more complex because they come with their own products, according to an LPL executive.
Morgan advisors to gain from Carta deal. Morgan Stanley is one of the go-to financial-services providers for companies looking to keep track of ownership stakes as they are poised to go public, or those that already have. But Morgan Stanley at Work wasn't a great fit for early-stage companies still several years away from an IPO. Now that the Wall Street giant has struck a deal with record-keeping service Carta, Morgan Stanley advisors could be the beneficiaries of a lucrative referral business, particularly as the IPO pipeline "looks as ready to materialize as we've seen," according to the head of Morgan's wealth management division.
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November 22, 2024 08:53 ET (13:53 GMT)
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