Proprietary products.

They sell their plans as a package (a la the former American Express).

W & R has a pretty good line of funds, expenses and sales charges may be a bit high. They also own Ivy fund company, which also is solid and is brokered out by many other dealers. They have been around for a long-time and must do ok. They pretty much serve the middle class. They might be a good place to learn the business for a few years.

Looked at them briefly in my search for independence.  They appeared to be a firm that really emphasized financial planning, which is certainly not a bad thing at all.  In the end, I went with LPL because I wanted to operate as a true independent and I didn’t get he impression that I would have as much freedom.  That said, they looked like a decent firm with a good local reputation.

You should look into some of their settlements regarding (truly) abusive annuity settlements over the last few years.

From what I recall most of the Ivy funds were pretty lame...

Look at Asset Strategy and Global Natural Resources....I will sell those.

You may be right about abusive annuity sales, that is prolly just a few bad reps making improper reco's.

Actually, if I recall, it was a firm wide decision to move clients with a certain type of prop annuity in to a new annuity type, thus causing a great deal of churning… Could be wrong, but probably not because I am the smartest person ALIVE…

Yeah , I think you are right actually.

It was a corporate strategy.

 I worked for W&R many years ago, before they had any training salary. Good place to get your feet wet with financial planning.However you as an adviser can only sell W&R funds and Ivy, most of which suck. Check out the Morningstars on 'em. I recently rolled about 300,000 out of a new clients IRA with W&R, it was easy.

Point being, you'll get clobbered by the competition without the ability to offer many different funds, and W&R doesn't sell stocks. Also limited to 1 or 2 insurance companies. W&R also caters to middle/ low income. So if YOU want middle to low income yourself, go with W&R.

Stok

In my lame opinoin. Waddell and Reed didn't seem to have a good "consumer" opinion. I looked at that when trying to find the right firm to work for. Let me know how it goes...

As for annuities... we gotta stop pushing clients into these. I cannot stand annuities. Sorry, that's a little off topic.

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