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As a professional, you have faced your clients with competency so far, helping them with your education, experience, and expertise. Now, it seems this foundation on which our profession is based is itself crumbling, and to continue as professionals implies that we seek more insights in this very difficult business of ours. Now, more than ever, is the time to begin a whole new journey, a way of moving forward with only the lessons from the past and without any of its shortcomings or regrets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic and practitioner research evaluates portfolio performance using size and value/growth attributes or factors. We assess the merits of popular evaluation procedures based on matched-characteristic benchmark portfolios or time-series return regressions by applying them to a sample of active money managers and passive indexes. Estimated abnormal returns display large variation across approaches. The benchmarks typically used in academic research—attribute-matched portfolios from independent sorts, the three-factor time-series model, and cross-sectional regressions of returns on stock characteristics—track returns poorly. Some simple alterations improve the performance of these methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many investors purchase mutual funds through intermediated channels, paying brokers or financial advisors for fund selection and advice. This article attempts to quantify the benefits that investors enjoy in exchange for the costs of these services. We study broker-sold and direct-sold funds from 1996 to 2004, and fail to find that brokers deliver substantial tangible benefits. Relative to direct-sold funds, broker-sold funds deliver lower risk-adjusted returns, even before subtracting distribution costs. These results hold across fund objectives, with the exception of foreign equity funds. Further, broker-sold funds exhibit no more skill at aggregate-level asset allocation than do funds sold through the direct channel. Our results are consistent with two hypotheses: that brokers deliver substantial intangible benefits that we do not observe and that there are material conflicts of interest between brokers and their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors of this article contend that financial service practitioners should invest time to read articles on the cutting edge of their chosen field. They note that many articles that appear in academic journals have significant relevance to financial service practitioners, but the articles sometimes seem too theoretical or are written in legalese. This paper identifies 14 recent academic articles and summarizes them in a way that makes them more accessible to practitioners. Each article is related to one of three areas within the Certified Financial Planner® topic list (investment planning, retirement planning, and estate planning). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how financial planners are facing new demands when dealing with the baby boomer generation entering retirement. The article points out that baby boomers moving from an accumulation stage to an expenditure stage face a widely different society and economy than any other generation before them. Baby boomers themselves are also vastly different than previous generations, with such factors as longer life expectancy, greater health care, more formal education, and larger accumulations of wealth.

Abstract: The new rules of Circular 230 require changes in the way practitioners document recommendations and communicate with clients in many general tax-planning situations. This article provides an overview of the applicability of Circular 230 including a description of covered opinions and additional detail related to the two types of covered opinions most likely to be encountered by financial professionals - the tax-avoidance strategy and the reliance opinion. A discussion of best practices for tax professionals to comply with these rules is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Financial planners don't talk much to their clients about planned giving. Yet, colleges, universities, medical facilities, libraries, museums, religious organizations, and the thousands of foundations and other charitable institutions in the United States rely on the charitable nature of their alumni and millions of other supporters for their very existence. This article will present many of the various charitable gift techniques and the tax ramifications that can be presented by financial planners to help their clients in this important effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aligning the division of assets of a family business owner for estate planning purposes can often be a challenging proposition for both clients and advisors. However, everyone involved may have to recognize that reaching a solution may require both patience and a practical sense that the "perfect is the enemy of the good." The choice of solutions possible offers a great opportunity for the imaginative estate planner to offer lasting value to the family business owner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a growing awareness of the potential of innovation provided by digital technology, insurance companies have increasingly adopted digital agendas in their business activities. Our paper studies the relationship between the expression of a digital agenda in annual reports and the business performance of 41 publicly-traded European insurance companies for the time period from 2007 to 2017. Our findings show a positive relationship, which is particularly strong in cases where companies take a comprehensive approach by addressing digital technology both in the context of internal activities within their own organisation and external activities in connection with customers and business partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential effects of consumer financial education on insurance advice seeking with a large and representative national data set in the U.S. Previous research has examined factors associated with insurance advice seeking. After controlling for these factors, financial education, which has not been examined in previous research, is positively associated with this behaviour. Specifically, high school and workplace financial education show positive associations with insurance advice seeking. Further analyses show that there are differences in insurance advice seeking between consumers with and without life insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most common pitfalls that financial planners encounter is the very low percentage of clients who have completed a formalized plan. Along with strengthening the relationship with our clients, there are many other tangible benefits to designing a retirement planning path. Retirement plans should be monitored periodically to increase the probability of successful goal achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior analyst literature focuses on the impact of financial analysts on the firms they cover, and prior information-transfer literature concentrates on the externalities of information provided by management. This paper fills gaps in both streams of literature by examining the focal firm's market reactions to the closest peer firm's (identified by product similarity) analyst revisions. We find that the focal firm's stock price reacts to the closest peer's analyst revisions made by analysts who are not covering the focal firm. The focal firm's cumulative abnormal return for a five-day window centered on the revision date is 0.54% higher if the peer firm's analyst revision magnitude is in the top decile than if it is in the bottom decile. Cross-sectional tests show that the sensitivity of the focalfirm's market reactions to the peer firm's revisions increases with the revision informativeness and the similarity between the focal firm and the peer firm. In addition, we find that focal firms do not react to peer firms' revisions in industries with strong competition where the competitive effects cancel out the spillover effects. Finally, we find that the focal firm's market reactions can predict its own future analyst revisions, suggesting that the reactions are at least partially rational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim/purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify the characteristics that are typical of mutual fund managers. Design/methodology/approach - The study concentrates on a set of socio-demographic data, such as: age, gender, education, experience, and professional qualifications of 336 portfolio managers. The applied research strategy relies on an analysis concerning a set of statistical metrics describing the population under examination. Findings - The average Polish fund manager is a 37-year-old man, a holder of a stock-broker or investment adviser license. He obtained the authorization from the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) a few years after graduating from the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH). He has 11 years' experience in financial markets and 7 years' experience in the mutual fund industry. Research implications/limitations - The identification of managerial characteristics for the purpose of creating a profile of a Polish mutual fund manager will provide an important basis for further surveys and analyses aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of mutual funds. Originality/value/contribution - There are no investigations within the discussed area in Polish studies. Therefore, the identification of the characteristics that are typical of mutual fund managers will make a contribution to the finance literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal financial planning is a set of activities required for defining objectives, setting action plans, and satisfying financial needs of individuals. Different authors represent the personal financial planning process through models, indicating disadvantages to apply them in the Colombian environment since they have been created in developed countries; they suppose the existence of a financial planning industry and there are no academic studies which adapt them to meet the inherent needs of the environment. In order to solve such disadvantages, this research proposes the definition of a unifying personal financial planning model which embraces different elements that are identified from studied models, applicable in the Colombian environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examines ethics in financial planning in the context of the events that have occurred in the Australian economic and regulatory environment in the last decade and provides empirical evidence of the ethical behaviour of financial advisers in Australia. Design/ methodology/ approach: A mixed methods research design was employed using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with financial advisers and clients. Client participants were randomly recruited using the Unaddressed Mail Service (UMS) and financial adviser participants were randomly selected from Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) holders/representatives. The study used qualitative data mining software (Leximancer) and statistical software (SPSS) to analyse the results. Findings: Clients ranked financial advisers highly on their technical competence but lowest on social/ethical awareness, nonetheless clients generally found their most recent financial adviser to be ethical and possessing the necessary technical competencies. Furthermore, clients rated the ethical values of financial advisers as more important than technical competence and advisers were found to genuinely care for their clients. Both clients and advisers acknowledged that rogue advisers give other more ethical advisers a bad name and that education has an important role to play in this regard. Practical / social implications: Findings support both a code of ethics and ongoing professional development for advisers and suggest an ethics curriculum is desirable. Originality: This is the first study to explore ethical behaviour of financial advisers in Australia from both the client and adviser perspectives using a mixed method approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationality would suggest that advice-seeking investors receive benefits from costly financial advice. However, evidence documenting these benefits for US investors has so far been lacking. This article is the first to document that US mutual fund investors indeed receive one of the many previously hypothesized benefits associated with financial advice. The documented benefit comes from valuable tax-management advice that helps investors avoid taxable fund distributions and becomes even more valuable when investors face distributions that can cause large and hard-to-predict tax liabilities. Additional evidence suggests that financial advice helps with other aspects of tax management such as tax-loss selling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first to evaluate the effect of sources of information on households' consistency between their risk attitude when making savings and investment decisions and risk behavior displayed when they do save and invest. As the responsibility is being shifted to individuals to save for their own financial future, it is important that individuals and households save and invest in a manner that is consistent with their financial risk tolerance. Financial planners were found to provide significant value to households on the consistency of their financial risk attitude and behavior. The implications of this work are far-reaching in the financial planning arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for long-term financial planning should occur in the first years of youth, especially now that aging is a widely debated topic. In other words, financial planning should start with our first job. Although for most of us there will always be short or medium term priorities, such as buying a car or a house, we must not lose sight of the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]