Displaying items by tag: Morgan Stanley

Wells Fargo continues to bolster its recruiting efforts with the addition of four Morgan Stanley advisors generating close to $5.6 million in annual revenue. The largest of the hires is Steven Esposito from Lake Forest, Illinois, who moved to Wells Fargo Advisors’ independent Financial Network channel. He managed $435 million in client assets and generated $2.8 million in annual production at Morgan. Esposito, a 39-year industry veteran, has worked at six firms, including Morgan Stanley for the past 14 years. Roni Murshad, a 20-year-industry veteran from Gaithersburg, Maryland, also made the move from Morgan to Wells FiNet. The advisor managed $79 million and generated $860,000 in annual production. Murshad, who began his career at Morgan Stanley in 2001, left after five years, and spent six years at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, before returning to Morgan in 2012. In addition, two advisors from Westlake Village, California moved their team from Morgan to Wells Fargo. Howard Lee and Terri Lane managed $400 million and generated $2.1 million in annual production at Morgan. Lee started his career at Lehman Brothers in 1964, while Lane worked at six firms with stints at UBS and Bear Stearns, before joining Morgan Stanley.

Finsum:Wells Fargo bolsters its ranks with four Morgan Stanley advisors generating close to $5.6 million in annual production.

Merrill Lynch has landed a San Franciso-based financial advisor from Morgan Stanley. Nandi Gunning, who managed $430 million at Morgan, joined Merrill Lynch’s private wealth management business, which caters to high-net-worth clients. According to the firm, the former CMW Group is now the CWMG Group with the addition of Gunning. The team includes advisors Anthony Canini, John Myers, and Andrew Wages. The CWMG Group also includes five support staff and is based in San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio. It oversees $2.5 billion in total. Gunning got her start at Morgan in 2014. She was drawn toward Merrill’s capabilities in banking, lending, and trust offerings. She also liked the idea of switching from running her own practice to working on a team. As part of a statement, she wrote, “While everyone has unique gifts, the power of teams is bringing together individual skills and talents, diverse perspectives, and vast experience to serve a common purpose. Diverse teams have a broader, more comprehensive view, and the more perspectives the better.” Merrill had previously landed a $1 billion team from Citi earlier in the month.

Finsum:Morgan Stanley advisor jumps ship to Merrill, drawn by the firm’s banking, lending, and trust offerings and the chance to work as part of a team.

Cherly Young, a financial advisor and team based in Los Gatos, CA is planning on leaving Morgan Stanley and joining First Republic. She’ll be taking her $17 million in annual revenue and a giant $2 billion book with her. Her all-star status and revenue generation has put her in the upper echelon of California Advisors and ranked her #84 on Barron’s nationwide list. First Republic has put in a lot of effort on building a high-end advisor base, and they have offered a variety of incentives to get there. Still their sales force is a fraction of Morgan Stanley’s which boasts 16,000 brokers, and is still touting positive recruiting results. 

Finsum: Many financial firms are forcing full time in-office work, and First Republic sees remote pitch as a part of their campaign, while MS is caping remote work at 90-days. 

Model portfolios have been a surprisingly quick growing tool for the financial industry in the last year, and Morgan sStanley’s Wealth Management is capitalizing by adding a series of new model portfolios. These strategies will have hefty minimums of $750k to $1.5 million and are targeting tax and direct indexing strategies from the recently acquired Parametric. This was a key reason Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric last year to rapidly develop and deploy direct indexing strategies. Overall the portfolios have acquired $150 million in assets since their inception in January.

Finsum: Financial companies took a page out of tech companies playbook by just acquiring the companies that might align with them and allow the to quickly scale when it came to direct indexing.

David Kostin, a strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., took a bearish tilt on U.S. stocks worrying about risks that may be on the road ahead. Goldman is far from the only bear on Wallstreet, Michael Wilson of Morgan Stanley says that the fair value of the S&P 500 is closer to 4,000. This would be a 10% downturn in the S&P if fully realized. Goldman isn’t that pessimistic but if real U.S. treasury yields rise 60 basis points then that will be their baseline. The median forecast is still quite positive for the S&P 500 by the end of the year with a target price close to around 5,100. However, Wallstreet says the antidote is to focus on quality and energy stocks.

FINSUM: Wall street is forgetting how bad sustained realized inflation will be for the market; it's without a doubt the biggest risk, because companies are used to operating with systematic sub 2% inflation.