Financial Advisor Transition

The alternative is to be proactive by helping a grieving client name and address the financial concerns that loss creates, without ever rushing them. Doing that well takes two things: an understanding of how grief actually unfolds and a deliberate process for the conversation itself.

As clients come to advisory shops more informed, due to the plethora of financial advice available online, firms will need to be able to “stress test the information or bias” they arrive with. A comprehensive team, with training across advisory areas, can offer clients more depth of service.

When navigating leadership decisions that leave a team feeling underappreciated, offering benefit of the doubt can reduce personal frustration and help maintain productive daily interactions.

Donald Trump’s pledge to ensure that Bitcoin mining activity is centered in the US is rapidly disintegrating under the twin forces of the artificial intelligence boom and a prolonged crypto slump.

Direct venture investment rewards a rigorous, patient approach. The companies that generate exceptional returns tend to combine all three factors above: genuine growth momentum, clear category ownership, and strong institutional support.

If you were Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and you were laying out a few sector-shifting artificial-intelligence trends that could take shape over the coming months and years.

Nvidia Corp. has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence startup Hugging Face in a transaction valued at about $13 billion.

The recent IPO of SpaceX and the anticipated IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI are focusing attention on how to invest following a liquidity event. Here, we discuss several important decision points.

There are ways to learn how to work with difficult people. I have a process I call ARTICA that I teach to help you shift your approach when someone is being difficult. Their behavioral style isn’t going to change, so you need to be the one to think of a different approach to see if you can shift yours. In turn, they might change their approach.

Nvidia Corp. is not only tightening its grip on artificial intelligence, it’s also absorbing the companies fighting to keep the industry open and decentralized. On the same day the chip giant announced quarterly revenue that had doubled and would continue rising next year, sending its shares up 7%, news broke that it has reportedly agreed to spend $13 billion on Hugging Face, a platform for open-weight AI models.

The irony is that the advisors who most need to delegate are the ones who find it hardest. You need to stop being the hero of every story. There are four reasons why, and every one of them is a story you tell yourself.

I was recently asked how to instill accountability and urgency in this next generation. Set expectations and offer guidance. Remember, this is a generation that largely grew up not speaking to other people and definitely not calling anyone.

When a typical business finds its supply chain costs have risen, it will absorb the increase to keep its customers happy. Nvidia isn’t a typical business. It enjoys gross profit margins of 75% and commands between 70% and 90% of the global market for artificial-intelligence chips.

Amazon.com Inc.’s Andy Jassy has begun making an audacious boast during conference calls this year. Though his company remains a top Nvidia Corp. customer, it’s also one of the world’s largest makers of data center chips in its own right.

Agentic AI won't scale until it owns the meeting cycle—not by replacing advisors or acting without oversight, but by maintaining operational continuity: assembling context, preserving memory, and driving approved actions through to completion.

I’m always asked for scripts. You don’t want a script. You want to be natural and approach clients in a manner that fits you. Practice, practice, practice until it seems natural and comfortable. Authentic is always best.

More than a decade ago, hundreds of US garage entrepreneurs were working on shoestring budgets to develop drones with dreams of scaling the new technology. Then China’s DJI introduced a small, inexpensive drone with a stable built-in camera.

As growth accelerates, the first question a leadership team has to answer is not how big the firm can get. It is where the frontier sits, the exact point at which scale stops generating lift and starts generating drag.

US existing home sales fell a little in July, according to data released last week by the National Association of Realtors. But what really stands out when one looks at the numbers is how little they’ve changed over the past three years. This July, homes were selling at an annual pace of 4.06 million. In July 2023, it was 4.08 million.

SpaceX has completed a $60 billion acquisition of artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor, a key part of Elon Musk’s bid to gain ground on rivals Anthropic PBC and OpenAI.

After 10 years, we understand that not every conflict has a clean answer. Advisors value feeling heard and supported through difficult situations. Over time, we’ve learned that genuine engagement and thoughtful communication build more trust than rushing toward incomplete answers.

I recently spent a week working with advisors and team members on a variety of things, all human-element related. The financial business is one of numbers and quantifiable results, but we all know it is much more than this. This week’s column will encapsulate my aha moments from this week.

The outlook for Boeing Co. to earn copious cash flow is bright. It just turned free-cash-flow positive in the second quarter after years of losses, and the company already has its sights on cash earnings of $10 billion a year. This is driven almost entirely by a rebound of commercial aircraft production.

South Korea expects to deploy more than 1 trillion won ($707 million) of fresh capital into a new sovereign wealth fund targeting AI and other strategic industries next year, joining a global push by governments to mobilize investment and gain an edge in high-tech sectors.

The AI question is not really a technology question for your firm; it is a documentation question wearing a technology costume. Your advisors are already using it, and the SEC has already told you it is watching how you handle it. The only open question is whether, when an examiner asks, you can show your work.

Outlining clear expectations for success — desired outcomes that are both quantifiable and qualitative. It means setting objectives to meet these desired outcomes every week and then checking in to see to see if they met them.

Investment firms for billionaires hailing from the US, Europe and Asia are driving a wave of deals for robotics AI businesses, defying fears about a bubble in the machine-learning sector.

Sequoia Capital led a $1 billion funding round for Valar Atomics Inc. that the nuclear startup says will help it shift from demonstrating small reactors to producing them in volume.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is vowing to funnel $750 billion into housing over the next decade, nearly 40% more than it has over the past 10 years, as part of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s push to invest more money in US communities.

In the race to win a coveted role on the next mega US IPO and manage the ensuing riches, Wall Street’s wealth advisers are ramping up lending to founders and entrepreneurs based on the soaring values of their private companies.

Investors overwhelmingly recognize the value of financial planning, but a substantial planning gap remains. The desire for guidance is there. Access remains the challenge.

The combination of succession planning — where the lead advisor wants to have a successful and well-funded retirement and the successors want to get paid for taking over — along with the riches of the market over the last few years are all adding up to significant unrest within many teams.

In the coming years, more investors will expect financial planning to be a key part of the services they receive from advisors. To be prepared, advisors will need technology to help streamline added workflows, as well as the expertise of certified financial planners to support their clients long term.

Registered investment advisors (RIAs) are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools that automatically transcribe and summarize client calls. While these technologies may offer efficiency gains, they introduce significant legal and compliance risks. This article discusses the intersection of AI transcription tools with state wiretapping laws, privacy considerations, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requirements, and the evolving litigation landscape.

The global luxury industry, which has been grappling with three years of lackluster sales, may gain some relief as wealth generated by artificial-intelligence companies and their trillions of dollars of initial public offerings finds its way into fancy fripperies.

When clients, specifically, feel they matter to their advisor, they engage more deeply in the planning process, follow through on recommendations, refer more frequently, and build lasting relationships that transcend market volatility.

Blackstone Inc. leaned on Wellington Management Co. and Vanguard Group to create two new funds that will give individual investors access to private assets as it looks to go beyond its roots as a money manager for pensions and institutions to become more of a household name.

to come

President Xi Jinping used the rise of China’s AI models to stake his claim on shaping the technology’s global rules, even as their growing power stirs security concerns in Washington and Beijing alike.

Apple Inc. is again the biggest company in the world after wresting the title from Nvidia Corp., which has held it since May 2025.

As prediction markets draw record trading around events like the World Cup, Jump Trading Group is betting the once-niche contracts are becoming a lasting corner of Wall Street.

The labor gap is creating pressure on firms to do more with their existing teams, and AI is giving those teams the tools to actually do it. Here is how firms achieve double-digit growth using AI, even while navigating a workforce transformation they cannot fully control.

For this week’s column, in the wake of the holiday celebrating our country’s independence, I’ll share some independent thinking for advisors to implement, whether it be with their teams, in their practice or with their clients. I’ll keep it brief in the hopes you will find one or two things that resonate.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trounced its own Wall Street stock-trading records, posting $7.42 billion for a quarter that saw indexes rip higher and ongoing market volatility around artificial intelligence and war in the Middle East.

The Federal Aviation Administration is resurrecting the dream of passengers flying faster than the speed of sound after it recently proposed lifting a ban on supersonic flights over land, which has been in place for more than five decades.

After years of working with advisors and studying client behavior, the reasons clients leave come down to three core patterns. They are predictable. They are preventable. And they almost always trace back to a conversation that never happened in the first meeting.

I have spent the better part of my career watching how organizations manage access to sensitive data — who has it, who should have it, and how long it takes anyone to notice when those two things stop matching. In financial services, that gap tends to be measured in months.

Steven Pinker's latest book digs into why the knowledge we hold in common matters and how it helps society operate more smoothly.

The US industrial robot industry is characterized by low growth and highly customized projects. Artificial intelligence holds out the hope to change that, especially when it comes to robots that can move and work safely around humans.

With the artificial intelligence race moving so rapidly, even a momentary lag can be costly. Alphabet Inc.’s Google is learning this the hard way: The search giant rapidly caught up with

The firms that operate rigorous vendor evaluation will compound two advantages simultaneously: They buy the right tools now, and their advisors trust them when the next generation of AI arrives. In a decade that will be defined by the industry's capacity to do more with fewer people, that trust is a strategic asset.

Acquiring a book of business is one of the fastest ways an independent advisor can grow AUM, expand a client base, and build long-term enterprise value. It is also one of the most financially consequential decisions you will ever make — and most advisors approach it underprepared.

At the start of the regional war in February, Wall Street banks were grappling with the prospect of a protracted slowdown in the Middle East. Three months in, many firms are rushing to add bankers after local investors largely looked past the conflict and doubled down on dealmaking.