\n ‘This is about as fiercely competitive an environment for a group of advisors as I\u2019ve ever seen,’ says one senior industry executive.\n <\/p>\n
The fight<\/a> for Commonwealth Financial Network\u2019s financial advisors is turning into a street brawl<\/a>, with one analyst, Steven Chubak of Wolfe Research, saying yesterday that roughly 5% of the firm\u2019s total have exited for competitors since LPL Financial Holdings Inc. at the end of March said it was buying its rival for $2.7 billion in cash<\/a>.<\/p>\n LPL has said since it bought Commonwealth from its founder Joe Deitch its target is to retain 90% of the firm\u2019s financial advisors. Senior industry executives are privately questioning whether LPL will hit that mark, particularly as a plethora of firms are chasing the high producing, high quality Commonwealth reps.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is about as fiercely competitive an environment for a group of advisors as I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d said one senior industry executive who spoke privately to InvestmentNews about the matter. \u201cAnd it\u2019s because the Commonwealth advisors are the cream of the crop.\u201d<\/p>\n LPL\u2019s acquisition of Commonwealth, which it completed over the summer, gave a jolt to the 3,000 or so advisors there, many of whom had no desire to leave before LPL\u2019s purchase. Five percent would represent close to 150 financial advisors.<\/p>\n \u201cThese financial advisors are what ever firm is looking for,\u201d the executive said. \u201cThey have a high production of annual revenue, clean compliance histories and a very high percentage of advisory business, which means predictable revenue.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Chubak, managing director of Wolfe Research and a leading brokerage analyst, wrote in a note yesterday that LPL\u2019s retention target of 90% of Commonwealth advisors was still in the cards. That\u2019s after InvestmentNews and other trade publication have reported LPL\u2019s rivals successfully recruiting Commonwealth advisors with billions of dollars of client assets.<\/p>\n \u201cOur team has been monitoring [Commonwealth] trends quite closely, and while [Commonwealth] attrition has picked up these last three months, that\u2019s consistent with prior deal seasonality where attrition accelerates 3 to 6 months post announcement,\u201d Chubak wrote. \u201cThus far we\u2019ve seen ~ 5% cumulative attrition, and while we anticipate additional departures, we also believe retention will likely settle at or around 90%.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless of whether LPL reaches its goal, high-quality Commonwealth advisors are leaving. InvestmentNews reported last week that Raymond James since August recruited totals 18 Commonwealth teams with close to $4.5 billion in assets, according to a tally of its press releases. And last week alone, Raymond James said it has recruited four Commonwealth teams with $1.08 billion in assets.<\/p>\n And there appears to be no slowdown. Cetera Financial Group on Tuesday said it recruited the Manalapan, N.J.-based King Financial Network, a team with $1.1 billion in client assets and formerly registered with Commonwealth, to its Cetera Wealth Services broker-dealer.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘This is about as fiercely competitive an environment for a group of advisors as I\u2019ve ever seen,’ says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62950,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[114,46278,268,85,46,46277,266,267,46279],"class_list":{"0":"post-62949","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-commonwealth-financial","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-lpl-financial","14":"tag-personal-finance","15":"tag-personalfinance","16":"tag-raymond-james"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62949\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}