Cetera Holdings this week said it was spending $1.2 billion to acquire the nearly 3,100 tax focused financial advisors at Avantax Inc., a clear indication that the valuations for broker-dealers and registered investment advisors are still climbing and no one knows how high they will go. To put that $1.2 billion price tag into perspective, Avantax, which was named Blucora Inc. up until it changed its name last year, in 2015 and 2019 spent $760 million to acquire two broker-dealers, the former...

The New York Post reported Thursday that another senior executive at Goldman Sachs Asset & Wealth Management was considering heading to the exit, with Laurence Stein, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the group, the next potentially to go. The Post’s reporting about Stein comes after months of executives leaving the group, which Goldman Sachs Group Inc. routinely touts, along with its nascent registered investment advisor custody group, as one of its two main arms to...

LPL Financial Holdings Inc. and Prudential Financial Inc. announced Thursday morning that Prudential will move the retail brokerage and investment advisory assets of 2,600 financial advisors from Prudential Advisors’ current custodian, Fidelity’s National Financial Services, to LPL Financial. LPL is not buying Prudential’s retail wealth management business but instead will act as the service provider for the financial advisors, who work with roughly $50 billion in client assets. Prudential...

The rebranding and consolidation of the former Advisor Group broker-dealers started in earnest this week as the first of the eight firms, Royal Alliance Associates Inc., saw its name erased and replaced with Osaic Wealth Inc. The Royal Alliance name and brand had been around since 1989, and the firm has been through multiple transactions and combinations, most recently operating as part of the Advisor Group group of eight broker-dealers with 11,000 financial advisors and around $500 billion...

The summer of wealth management name changes rolls on as CI Private Wealth, one of the fastest-growing registered investment advisors ever to compete in the financial advice industry, Tuesday morning said it was rebranding as Corient, a combination, according to the company, of the phrase “client oriented.” Picking a new name for a well-known, established firm seems to be in vogue this year. In May, Riskalyze announced that its new name was Nitrogen to reflect the company’s evolution from...