Products September 16, 2010

Fidelity Aims to Help RIAs Expand Business

A new Fidelity program, “Expand Your Practice,” is intended to help registered investment advisers (RIAs) analyze their readiness to grow through mergers, acquisitions, or hiring new people.
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The new materials are divided into three parts: 

  1. “Your Guide to Expansion White Paper,” which includes a self-assessment checklist, a hypothetical case-study, and several worksheets.  
  2. “Expanding Your Practice – Are you Ready? White Paper,” which includes advice from five M&A experts. 
  3. “Expanding Your Practice” webinars for advisers to interact with a panel of M&A experts and discuss some of the critical issues to consider when preparing to expand a practice. The first one-hour session is scheduled for September 30.  

“As the country emerges from the financial crisis of the past couple of years, many advisers may have more time to spend evaluating strategies that can help them accelerate the growth of their firm,” said David E. Canter, executive vice president at Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services and head of Fidelity’s Practice Management and Consulting organization. “We believe advisers may have a window of opportunity to increase their competitiveness through growth and acquisition. Because M&A activity can be complicated and time consuming, we have developed in-depth resources that can help advisers better understand the opportunities and challenges, while effectively positioning their firm for greater and more sustainable growth.” 

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This new program is in addition to RIA Match, a program designed to match brokers looking to become RIAs with a list of firms that would suit their needs.   

 

Diversions September 16, 2010

Angels in the Outfield? More Likely Ghosts…

In a commentary in The Baltimore Sun this week, two writers suggest that the woes of the Washington Nationals baseball team are caused by none other than John Wilkes Booth.
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Perhaps they are just two more depressed Washington Nationals fans, digging desperately for excuses as to why their team has yet again performed so poorly this season–or maybe Mark Greenbaum and David O’Leary, commentators for the Sun, are on to something…  

As a team with “mediocre arms, tired bats, and underwhelming prospects” (their words, not mine), Greenbaum and O’Leary have drawn the conclusion that the Nats have been cursed by the ghost of John Wilkes Booth–the notorious assassin of Abraham Lincoln.  

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They say that not only has the team suffered from the usual trials and tribulations of a new franchise (the Nationals have only been in D.C. since 2005), such as mismanagement, but something far more grave is unfolding.  When Stephen Strasburg, a young, new pitcher who struck out 14 batters in his first big league start, suffered a potentially career-ending arm injury, Greenbaum and O’Leary thought of other teams that have had similar bad luck. The Chicago Cubs have the “Curse of the Billy Goat” and the Red Sox had the “Curse of the Bambino”–now it appears that the Nats have the Curse of the Assassin.  

According to the commentators: 

“Nationals Park sits directly on an infamous stretch of the Anacostia River where authorities conducted the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth on the ironclad U.S.S. Montauk anchored at the Navy Yard. Next door at Fort McNair, Booth’s co-conspirators were held and tried at the country’s first federal penitentiary, and four of them were hanged there in July 1865. Booth himself was buried there until his remains were later moved.” 

Greenbaum and O’Leary go on to discuss how Abe Lincoln was a huge fan of baseball’s predecessor, “town ball.”  There are several anecdotes of Lincoln either playing or watching the sport.  Perhaps it was his love for baseball that has caused the Nats to be targeted by Booth…for all eternity.  

  

  

 

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