RJ and Makay

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Financial advisors are finding Apple’s iPad an indispensable tool for boosting their productivity and providing efficiencies at conferences and client meetings.  Morning reading of newspapers and industry publications is made easy by Instapaper, an app that allows users to save articles from various news sites in one “paper” for convenient reading.

Financial professionals might be interested in an InvestmentNews report about a poll by Advisors Trusted Advisor, which recently uncovered some surprising trends in the financial advice industry. Of the 262 advisors polled, more than half were at fee-only firms, a quarter worked as independent reps, and the rest were employed by wirehouses, brokerages, banks or insurers. Survey participants had a median of about $400 million in assets under management.

Here are the seven trends the poll revealed, in descending order, just as described by InvestmentNews:

The largest, top 50 registered investment advisory (RIA) firms managed $127.2 billion by the end of the second quarter—up 16% from the same period last year.

According to research conducted by RIA Database for InvestmentNews, these top-50 RIAs also doubled the number of accounts to an estimated 3,600 accounts per firm—more than double the number of accounts they managed in the in 2009’s second quarter. Genspring Family Offices LLC topped the list this year, beating out Veritable LP.

Thirty-nine of top-50 RIA firms saw discretionary assets jump 27% from June 30, 2009 to the same time this year. (View the full set of rankings here.) Yet, these same firms only brought on 47 more accounts over the past year—indicating that much of this growth was due to market performance.