RIAs Shine Amidst Post-Apocalyptic Wall Street

I have a piece on my industry today at the Wall Street Journal.  You should totes check it out.

“It’s Our World, Everyone Else Just Lives In It.”

You could excuse the registered investment adviser (RIA) community for feeling this way lately — after all it’s basically true, at least in the financial services industry.

Investment Advisory in general, and the independent variety in particular, is the only finance-related business that’s seen assets under management (and by extension – fees) grow over the last five years.  Like a gleaming, late-model luxury sedan casually rolling past the flaming wreckage of post-credit crash Wall Street, our disassociation with the broken down vehicles littering both sides of the highway is simply impossible to ignore.

We are doing better than the bankers (who are being laid off by the tens of thousands globally) and better than the traders (who are having their lungs ripped out by algo-driven toaster ovens five days a week) and better than institutional brokers (who are watching their per-trade commissions now dwindle down into strange, new increments like nano-pennies per share).

Keep Reading:

It’s an RIA World, Everyone Else Just Lives in it (WSJ)