I signed WealthFly up for Google AdWords today. If you search on anything having to do with financial advisor news, wealth management technology, finance blog, etc. then WealthFly should pop up as a “Sponsored Link”. (Please don’t actually click on our links because it costs us money every time somebody clicks it.) I set a max limit of $0.50 per click but the amounts I’m seeing so far are much less.

Its been running for less than an hour and we’re already starting to see people clicking through to us. So far, I’ve seen people click through from “magazine investment advisor”, “MoneyGuidePro”, and “Techfi”. I should probably give it a few weeks so I can give you detailed data, but I’m so excited I’ll say right now:

*Every* advisor should sign up for Google AdWords.

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Recently, I have been trying to catch up on goings on in our industry and I ran across the concept of a Unified Managed Account.  It’s an interesting concept really, however, I see it as a marketing gimmick. If this one slipped under your radar don’t be alarmed.  It’s a small ($78 billion) but rapidly growing segment of the management market.

I started hearing about UMA’s about 5 years ago and the buzz keeps growing. Basically, a UMA is a SMA or Wrap program with more convenience. The idea is to allow multiple managers with multiple disciplines access to a single account. It’s not so much a new alternative investment, as it is a wrapper for existing investments.

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I saw Phantom of the Opera in Vegas last week at the Venetian. It’s a shorter version of the original opera designed for Vegas audiences, running about 90 minutes with no intermission. It was very good but definitely not the best Vegas show I’ve seen. For something dramatic, I would recommend the Cirque Soleil shows instead — Ka and O are my favorites.

Similar to Vegas-style Phantom, I like my FireFox browser but don’t love it. I’ve been a happy FireFox user for years. Its much faster than Internet Explorer, I like the plugins, and they’re leading the way with new features. But today I switched to (dramatic pause)… Opera! {Cue the scary organ music. And the chandelier.}

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For three days I’ve been instructing e*Trade to wire money out of my account and they’ve been giving me a variety of excuses why they can’t make it happen. I’ve never had problems with wires before, although e*Trade correctly points out that this is a much larger sum of money than I’ve previously wired. Apparently the larger amount of money has raised some flags and all of a sudden they’re not sure I am who I say I am. I’ve sent them a notarized letter and gone in person to a local branch so they could verify my bona fides. But they’re still “unable to verify my identity” and my wire hasn’t gone through.

I’m getting worried.

I think this may have something to do with the recent possibility of e*Trade being forced into Chapter 11. An analyst at Citigroup puts the risk at 15%, and his announcement alone could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy by causing a run on the brokerage. It certainly was a factor in my decision to pull money out. I can see where they might have an ulterior motive to keep assets on the books as long as possible, which may explain the difficulties with my wire.

The analyst report has some scary warnings:

If E*Trade doesn’t get significant support in the area of between $2 billion and $4 billion within the next week, or possibly 10 days, they’re going to be in dire straits,” Egan said.

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Something that always confounded me is how wealth managers generally don’t think in terms of “effective value” for their accounts. They restrict their thinking to the reported dollar value of the accounts they’re managing, not taking taxes or fees into consideration. These before-tax and before-fee numbers are deceptive–comparing taxable values against non-taxable values is like comparing apples and oranges.

William Reichenstein, CFA wrote an article in Investment News that illustrates the problem:

I want to make a case for calculating asset allocations in retirement accounts on an after-tax basis. First, consider 55-year-old Peggy, who is single and believes that she will be in the 25% marginal tax rate in retirement.

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I have a confession to make… I rarely check my e-mail. Its on my list of Top Ten Things I Hate. Every time I do it, I have to spend at least twenty minutes deleting spam messages before I can actually get around to reading e-mail. I’m usually lazy and don’t delete the spam first, so I end up missing messages and the whole process is just a complete pain in the a$$.

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Something interesting is happening right now. Congressman Ron Paul is the Republican dark-horse presidential candidate and he is setting a record for one-day individual campaign contributions. Paul will raise more than $2,000,000 $3,000,000 $4,000,000 today — for a relatively unknown candidate, that’s impressive extraordinary awe-inspiring.

Paul is an interesting character; he’s the only Republican anti-war candidate. He wants to move the US to a commodity-based anchor for the dollar. He’s a 10-term Congressman with a background in Austrian economics who sits on both the Economic and Financial Services Committees. He wants to disband the Federal Reserve, dramatically reduce taxes and gradually eliminate social security. His ideas would be *great* for the wealth management industry.

Here he is on Bloomberg talking economic policy:

[audio:http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/BBRECON/vFKYUZzwAQP4.mp3]

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Fidelity announced their new WealthCentral platform by placing billboard ads throughout Las Vegas this week, during the Schwab IMPACT conference. Ballsy move — I love it.

WealthCentral combines portfolio management, customer relationship management, financial planning and other applications on a single platform. It doesn’t actually exist yet, but Fidelity plans to spend $50 million developing it. The software will replace Advisor Channel.

This an interesting move by Fidelity. They’re obviously under pressure to compete with Schwab’s Portfolio Center offering which is getting more and more popular. But instead of building all the components in-house (like Schwab), they’re tying together several best-of-breed products. That’s a tricky proposition — one vendor’s integrated best-of-breed platform is another’s Frankenstein monster.

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UPDATE: I’m hearing the deal is >$100M.

PNC just acquired StatementOne Albridge. I hope it works out better for their clients than Techfi’s acquisition did.

From the press release:

The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC) announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Lawrenceville, N.J.- based Albridge Solutions Inc., a provider of portfolio accounting and enterprise wealth management services. Through relationships with 150 financial institutions and more than 100,000 financial advisors with assets under management that exceed $1 trillion, Albridge delivers an aggregate, single view of clients’ assets along with robust performance reporting and analysis. Albridge will increase the offerings of PFPC Worldwide Inc., PNC’s provider of global investment services.

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