Skip to footer

Breakaway brokers find a surprisingly bullish market

Breakaway brokers are gaining a lot of momentum, according to the Reformed Broker. One driver of the movement is the beating the bigger Wall Street houses took in the financial crisis, which has made investors wary of the large corporate firms.

|
Nick Ut/AP
Mark Prather an ERA broker, poses for a portrait in Yorba Linda, Calif. in this June 2012 file photo. Across the country, breakway brokers, realtors and builders, many of whom are small businesses, are seeing a sales comeback.

The breakaway broker trend is still full steam ahead according to TD's head of RIA biz Tom Nally (full disclosure, TD Ameritrade Institutional is my firm's primary custodian for client accounts.)

From Investment News:

The firm attracted a record 120 breakaway brokers to the RIA model and the custodian platform last quarter. That's almost 50% more than the same period in 2011. For fiscal 2012 — TD's year-end is in September — the company has signed up 324 breakaway brokers, a 23% gain over last year's first three quarters.

“The RIA is now the aspirational model for brokers,” said Mr. Nally, who was previously TD's managing director of institutional sales. “We don't see the trend slowing down. We have more brokers actively engaging us all the time.”

One major driver of the movement is the beating big Wall Street houses took in the financial crisis, according to Mr. Nally. “People are just not as enamored with the old brands as they used to be,” he said.

I myself broke away in 2010 and dropped my series 7 finally last year.  The markets are tough but I can't remember ever feeling this good about how I'm able to manage client accounts now.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Breakaway brokers find a surprisingly bullish market
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Reformed-Broker/2012/0719/Breakaway-brokers-find-a-surprisingly-bullish-market
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe