RJ and Makay

Schwab recently released an Independent Advisor Outlook Study focused on RIAs. 1200 RIAs were surveyed. The survey was conducted by Koski Research.  RIAbiz writer, Brooke Southall, shares these points about the findings:

1. Social media isn’t very popular. Of the 1,200 RIAs polled for the semi-annual survey, only 13% consider themselves “eager learners.”  The majority, 41%, say they are “tentative users”, and the remaining 34% call themselves “skeptical users.”  If they used social media, most RIAs in the study (42%) chose LinkedIn for professional usage. Even though 45% of RIAs surveyed use Facebook, only 6% leverage it professionally, compared to 39% who use it personally. Even less popular is Twitter, with just 3% of RIAs reporting that they use it professionally, and only 7% saying they use it personally. Blogging isn’t popular either. Only 14% of RIAs say they keep a public journal, and of those, 8% blog professionally and 2% see their blogging as both personal and professional. These attitudes back up findings from another study on social media and RIAs by Pershing-Aite, and may be reviewed in 9 Things to Know About the “truth” Concerning RIA use of Social Media.

Most in finance know that LPL has started the process with the SEC to go public. Brooke Southall did an article for RIABIZ titled 10 reasons why LPL Financial could pull off a hot IPO in a cold market. Brooke shares things to know about the LPL IPO and why it might succeed based on information in its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The article also shares concerns regarding LPL. She points out that the recruiting is different now showing that LPL recruited 490 brokers for the 12 months ended March 31, which was down 40% from the 630 advisors it nabbed for the previous 12 months. I personally believe LPL will end March 31, 2011 with fewer FAs recruited than they captured in 2010. I doubt that will have much of an impact for their IPO and even think LPL going public will increase their future recruiting success.