Wealth management

Stephen Wedel, an LPL adviser and founding partner of Four Seasons Wealth Management in St. Louis, is gathering a lot of assets by investing his clients' money in alternatives, including nontraded real estate investment trusts, oil-and-gas limited partnerships, managed futures and private equity.

The job market remained stagnant this year, both for advisers and wholesalers, according to Russell Reynolds Associates' wealth management recruitment and compensation trends report.

Investments pinned to nonfinancial criteria grew more than 13%, to $3.07 trillion in the three years through 2009, a troubled period when all professionally managed assets increased less than 1%, according to the Social Investment Forum Foundation.

The chairman of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards' board of directors said it is expecting "double the normal attrition" as a result of an 80% fee increase to fund a national public awareness campaign.

Pre-retirees who continuously held a 401(k) plan with Fidelity Investments for the past 10 years more than doubled their account balances, the Boston fund company said.

Kip Meadows, the chief executive officer and founder of the Rocky Mount, N.C., company, recently spoke about the effects of the Dodd-Frank law, tremendous commercial real estate opportunities and the new transparency hedge funds are embracing — even to the point of issuing daily net asset valuations.

Fiserv Inc. said USAA Federal Savings Bank has agreed to use its AdviceAmerica technology for retirement savings and distribution.

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Though performance and quality of research remain dominant themes in advisers' decisions on whether to recommend a product provider, their emotional responses to certain companies play a key role, too, Cogent Research said.

Dan Martino, manager of the T. Rowe Price Media and Telecommunications Fund, has two big advantages over competing fund managers.

Brent Lynn has beaten 96% of rivals since taking over the Janus Overseas Fund in 2003, in part by investing in stocks from emerging markets such as India and Brazil.

Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., the two biggest U.S. banks by assets, racked up perfect trading records for the second time this year, making money every day last quarter after accomplishing the same feat in the first three months of 2010.

Americans generally do not put as much into their employer-sponsored retirement plan as they should and many go by instinct in deciding how much to contribute.

Morgan Stanley's top official said his company, owner of 51% of Smith Barney, remains committed to buying the rest of it despite flux in the financial industry.

David Earls, a financial adviser at Workers' Credit Union, says a series of misconceptions by other advisers about blue-collar people has helped his business to thrive.

During the financial crisis, assets dropped, firms' revenues fell, buyers got scared and deals dried up. Now the recovery is adding assets back to clients' statements and revenues to advisers' balance sheets. And there is pent-up demand for deals.

The Baltimore global investment management firm T. Rowe Price has hired Craig Siddall, a veteran of institutional investment consulting and client management, as vice president and consultant relations manager focusing on Canada.

Cambridge CTO, which will provide high-level technology expertise to hedge funds and private-equity funds, has begun operations. The firm said it will be able to provide the equivalent services of a full-time chief technology officer at a fraction of the cost.

Glenmede Trust's office in New York has helped provide a quick asset boost in the wake of the market crash. The Philadelphia firm has added about $2 billion to its assets under management since the end of 2008, for a total of $18 billion.