USF Introduces Pricing Strategy for Wirehouse FAs Going Independent

US Fiduciary, Inc. (USF) has rolled out a new pricing strategy for wirehouse advisory teams going independent.

The strategy replicates the wirehouse pricing model for financial advisers and their clients while not burdening the adviser with all of the added expenses of being independent, USF said in a company announcement.

The firm pointed out that historically, as an independent adviser, expenses such as trading, performance reporting costs, and access to managers and products are charged at retail-like pricing, which diminishes profitability for the adviser. By USF covering all of these expenses, it creates a much smoother transition from the wirehouse.

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“We have also drawn upon the experience and insights of our entire team to build a pricing model and platform that facilitate the transition from a wirehouse environment to independence,” Bob Drake, the President and Chief Operating Officer of US Fiduciary, stated in the announcement.

Drake and Jeff Sills, one of USF’s Senior VPs and Divisional Officers, said USF has developed a process called Discovery through which it is able to assist the wirehouse rep in looking at their practice as a stand-alone business entity. USF can counsel advisers on what environment would be most beneficial to them, given their current business structure, and what strategic adjustments are available to them that would make their business structure more productive and profitable, Sills noted.

Additionally, US Fiduciary announced it recently became a signatory to the Broker Protocol, originally conceived by Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, UBS, and Morgan Stanley to protect their transitioning reps from the certain temporary restraining orders and lawsuits from the firm losing the transitioning broker. As a signatory to the Protocol, US Fiduciary and its reps will adhere to the steps in the Protocol.

More information can be found at http://www.usfiduciary.com.

When it Rains

Believe it or not, it actually rains less on weekends.
More precisely, it apparently rains more in the southeastern United States midweek than on weekends, according to a new study.
The study was carried out by atmospheric scientist Thomas Bell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and his colleagues. According to LiveScience.com, they looked at data collected by NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2005 – and found that it rains, on average, more between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. The clearest day of the week was Saturday, with nearly twice the rainfall on the wettest day, Tuesday afternoon, according to the report.
The Cause
Even more interesting – a suggestion that the cause of this phenomena – could be the air pollution created by the commuters and business operations.
The researchers made this connection by comparing the rainfall trend with corresponding air-pollution records from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. According to LiveScience, they specifically analyzed particulate matter, or the airborne particles associated with pollution, finding that between 1998 and 2005 air pollution tended to peak midweek as well.
Of course, “If two things happen at the same time, it doesn’t mean one caused the other,” Bell said, according to the report. “But it’s well known that particulate matter has the potential to affect how clouds behave, and this kind of evidence makes the argument stronger for a link between pollution and heavier rainfall.”
Those particles help clouds to grow – and, as water clings to the particles, additional water droplets form. However, some researchers think increased pollution thwarts rainfall by dispersing the same amount of water over more “seeds’, preventing them from growing large enough to fall as rain. But in the Southeast, the researchers said that summertime conditions for storms are already in place, overriding this buffering effect from scattering.

The results were published in the January 31 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.

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