Frost, LPL, Modern Wealth, Merit and Keen add advisors in late September

PWD's tracking shows five firms added advisors in late September, including full three-advisor teams at Frost Investment Services and LPL Financial. Frost recruited the Tavarez, Barnett & Steen group from UBS on September 27, LPL brought in Dan Fowler's team from Raymond James on September 24, and Modern Wealth Management, Merit Financial Advisors and Keen Wealth Advisors each recorded advisor moves on September 28.

Team moves are the entries with enough detail to test against something, and each of the two carried three advisors on a single record — the shape a group that expects to keep working together takes when it lands — while a set of individual filings arriving the same day can reach the same headcount and describe something different. What none of the entries carry is money: no asset figure, revenue figure, or book size attaches to any of the five firms' additions, so the headcounts can be compared and the businesses behind them cannot.

Frost's move is the more specific of the pair: the records name Ronald Clifford Tavarez as the individual on the move, date it September 27, and list the receiving entity as Frost Brokerage Services, Inc., a name that differs from the Frost Investment Services entity the same data set uses for the recruiting firm, and the roster runs under the names Tavarez, Barnett & Steen. A separate advisor-move row dated September 28 also runs from UBS to Frost Investment Services, with no team name and no person attached, and whether that row and the liftout involve the same people is not something the entries say.

Dan Fowler's team crossed four days earlier, on September 24, three advisors in the entry with Raymond James as the origin. Taken with the Tavarez liftout, the two teams started at UBS and Raymond James, four days apart, and landed at Frost and LPL, while nothing in either record describes the terms, the assets involved, or how long the conversations ran, so the fact that the two moves happened in the same week is the whole of what they share so far.

Modern Wealth Management's September 28 activity was the heaviest in the set by count of entries, with a four-advisor team liftout and six separate advisor-move rows, every one of them landing in the entity listed as MODERN WEALTH MANAGEMENT, LLC. Even the liftout row puts Modern Wealth Management on the origin side as well as the destination, and three of the six individual rows do the same, so the data establishes that advisors arrived and does not establish which firms they left.

Merit Financial Advisors logged three separate advisor-move entries on the same date, none with an origin firm listed and none naming a person or a team, while Keen Wealth Advisors logged one entry that names Keen on both sides. Three rows on one day with no names could be three unrelated arrivals or one group filed in pieces, and the entries cannot separate those readings, so neither can anything else in the material.

The repeats and the blanks set the limit on what a week like this can support: when an entry lists the same firm as origin and destination, or leaves the origin empty, the record says an advisor is now affiliated somewhere and says nothing about the firm that lost the advisor. A five-firm week read as a scoreboard needs both sides of the trade, and here the origins appear only for the two teams that came out of UBS and Raymond James.

Counting has the same problem: six entries at Modern Wealth, three at Merit and one at Keen describe filings, not hires of equivalent weight, and a lone advisor with a large book can generate a row the same size as a four-person team with a small one. Recruiting volume is the most publishable number in this business and, standing alone, nearly the least useful, because the question that decides whether the growth was worth its cost — whether the clients came and stayed — sits outside the record entirely. The practical use of a week like this one is comparison of shape rather than of size: which firms are bringing in teams, which are bringing in singles, and which rows leave the arrival's origin blank.

For anyone using a week like this as a recruiting benchmark, the three things that do the work are whether the arrivals were teams or singles, whether the origins are named, and whether anything besides headcount traveled with them; here the answers are both, only for the two teams from UBS and Raymond James, and nothing.

The destination names themselves are worth reading slowly, because the entries are inconsistent about them: Frost appears twice in the week's records under two entity names, Frost Investment Services and Frost Brokerage Services, Inc.; Modern Wealth appears as a firm name and as an LLC; Merit and Keen each appear only as the receiving name. Entity naming in a record like this is administrative, and it is also why two rows describing the same firm can read as two different firms in a hurry.

The data sorts these arrivals into two labels, team liftout and advisor move, and the split matters: the liftout label attaches to the Modern Wealth four-advisor group and to the Fowler and Tavarez teams, while the advisor-move label covers everything else, including the single row at Keen and the six at Modern Wealth. Among the liftouts, the two that come with names, Tavarez, Barnett & Steen and Fowler's group, are the entries another record could confirm, whereas the Modern Wealth liftout carries a headcount and no roster, which makes it a row that can be counted but not checked.

September 28 supplies entries for Modern Wealth, Merit and Keen in addition to the separate Frost row, a concentration that may reflect when paperwork cleared as much as when advisors decided to move; the entries carry no timestamps beyond the date and no sequence, so the same-day pile-up is real but its cause is unconfirmed, and anyone reading the day as a wave should hold that distinction.

DeVoe & Company announced a deal on September 24, an entry that names no counterparty and carries a size field with no unit attached, so the announcement is legible as activity and not as a price, and it sits in the same week as the recruiting with no record connecting it to any of the advisor rows. The row gives a date and a firm name; everything else about the transaction is absent from it.

On September 25, Bitwise's BSOL fund recorded two AUM changes in the same data set, $128 million and $188 million — a different kind of entry, a dollar figure attached to a fund rather than names and dates attached to a firm, and the data set reads them as fund money moving in the same window as the advisor consolidation.

Precision is worth applying to both numbers. An AUM change is a change, not a level: the entries do not give the fund's total, so neither figure can be turned into a percentage, and neither is labeled as a gain or a loss. Two such rows dated a day apart from the advisor moves recorded the same week also cannot show that the same clients, or the same decisions, produced both; the coincidence is a date range and nothing more until someone connects it.

Held together, though, the two kinds of record do something useful for a reader trying to size the week: advisor moves are slow and administrative, visible mostly to the firms holding the paperwork, while the fund lines are public and same-day. The dollars are the ones a client is likely to hear quoted, and the advisors are the ones who have to be reconstructed from filings later.

Five days is a narrow window, and none of these entries ranks any of the five firms against the others; the next useful check is whether October produces the same names at a similar rate, and whether any of them arrives with a book attached. Until one does, the advisors who moved are known and the dollars that moved with them are not.