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You may not have noticed, but over the summer a “Buckets” war broke out in the retirement income business. It seems that everyone has discovered “Buckets,” a reference to time-segmented asset allocation or “laddered” income-generation strategies.
In June of this year the non-profit National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) launched a retirement income-focused website called [...]

What factors stand in the way of independent advisors and broker-dealers maximizing their success in the retirement income and Rollover IRA markets? It’s a complicated question with multiple answers including the impact of potentially disruptive changes in the regulatory landscape.
One area that I am convinced will really matter is the quality of advisor-client communications. [...]

With so much upheaval in the economy one wonders about what changes may arise in the not too distant future. In that context let me offer two predictions:
Prediction Number One: All advisors will be deemed to be fiduciaries within 1-2 years.
There could be no development more disruptive to today’s financial products distribution landscape than [...]

Nothing happens in a vacuum. If it weren’t for Dateline NBC it’s very likely that the SEC wouldn’t have voted today to characterize indexed annuities as securities. You’ll recall Dateline’s “sting” operation featuring hidden cameras and shills posing as annuity prospects. In the post-Dateline environment the SEC apparently could not fail to act. Chairman [...]

It’s no secret that I’ve been critical of certain annuity sales practices, especially those associated with equity-indexed (fixed indexed) annuities. I’ve cited Allianz Life specifically as a company whose past product development and marketing strategies have not been good for the long-terms interests of the annuity industry. In stating publicly what many in the industry [...]

As someone who generally plays the role of interviewer, I’m appreciative of Senior Editor, Kerry Pechter, for the interview he conducted with me that appears in the December ‘07 issue of Annuity Market News. Kerry asked my about a variety of issues that are important to me including the state of the variable and fixed [...]

Mark S. Cassady, Chairman & CEO of LPL Financial Services will be my interview subject as part of the Leaders & Innovators series. Cassady heads-up the nation’s largest independent brokerage firm in terms of revenues. LPL is represented by more than 7,000 advisors in 4,500 branch offices. The firm, which has its own [...]

“Sarbanes Oxley, They’ve Got Moxie, But for Businesses, Their Act is Toxic…”
Joe Nocera’s New York Times business column recently addressed Sam Zell’s takeover of the Tribune Company, owner of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, baseball’s Chicago Cubs, among other assets. In the article (“Offering a Lifeline of Sorts to Newspapers”) Nocera describes [...]

Last Friday I featured part one of a multipart series on behavioral finance by RIIA Founding Chairman & Executive Director, François Gadenne. In today’s second installment, François asks, “Why can’t we be happy with what we have?”
One of the consequences of having evolved in a world of scarcity is that we are built to work [...]

Given my commitment to publishing new content on an almost daily basis, I did not want you to check-in starting Wednesday and see nothing but a test pattern while I’m away enjoying the sights in Athens and Crete.
Beginning tomorrow my family and I are off to Greece for a two week vacation. I did, [...]

The talks given during day two of NAFA’s Annuity Summit opened and closed strongly with one excellent presentation after another sandwiched in between.
ING’s Harry Stout led off with a compelling analysis of current industry dynamics and challenges. Low rates, a flat yield curve and a 13,000 level for the Dow Jones Industrials conspired [...]