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Summary: Countless books and movies have been written about the point at which computers shift from being our friend to becoming the enemy. For financial advisers, the battle lines are being drawn right now.Over the course of our careers, computers have helped elevate the services we provide to clients and have driven down costs.
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Summary: Advisers spend a lot of time thinking about their growth strategies. Two years ago, when InvestmentNews fielded the 2012 InvestmentNews/Moss Adams Financial Performance Study of Advisory Firms, we identified a subset of firms that were deemed “top performers." These firms were defined as the top quartile of participants across a range of metrics including revenue growth, cost control and profitability. The study found that the fastest-growing and most profitable firms sometimes take an unconventional approach to their business models.
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Summary: The language of finance is complicated, and sometimes intentionally so. From the “turgid dialect” of Fedspeak to the intentionally tortured and complicated mouse print disclaimers on investment prospectuses, the industry embraces verbosity. So when a New York Times best-selling author appears on 60 Minutes to declare that the stock market is “rigged,” it stands in stark contrast to the usual hedging, sidestepping and equivocating.
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Summary: We now are facing the threat of a compromised fiduciary standard that will allow brokerage firms to conduct business as usual. We have seen the SEC issue reports that openly talk about accommodating the brokerage industry’s business model.
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Summary: Fidelity Institutional announced Wednesday that is has opened an intriguingly named “Office of the Future” on its Smithfield, R.I., campus. The office was designed with input from the Fidelity Center of Applied Technology to address macro technology trends that have the biggest impact on advisors in the near future: mobile, pervasive video, evolving interfaces, cloud computing, social media, big data and gamification.
