After switching broker dealers, a long-time advisor is looking to attract a handful of reps to his new branch and to publicize his association with his current b/d.

For advice, as usual, we asked our panel of experts for their opinions: Hellen Davis, president of Indaba Training Specialists, a management consulting and training firm in Treasure Island, Fla; Philip Palaveev, president of Fusion Financial, an Elmsford, NY-based network of advisors; and Chip Roame, managing principal of Tiburon Strategic Advisors, a Tiburon, Calif.-based market research and strategy consulting firm for financial institutions and investment managers.

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Morningstar may have some competition in the marketplace for evaluating mutual funds. Putnam Investments rolls out its new FundVisualizer today, an open-architecture tool that allows advisors to research and compare over 10,000 mutual fund and ETF offerings through a web-based interface. (ETFs will be added to the tool in two weeks). Three advisors interviewed by Registered Rep. found the tool to be very simple and easy to use.

“It makes my life easier when I’m going to compare,” said Trenton Siskron, a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Houston. “We all have limited time throughout the day.”

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Continued growth in client trading and fees helped drive profits at Charles Schwab Corp. to higher-than-expected levels for the first quarter, the company said today. Meanwhile, assets in its RIA unit, Schwab Advisor Services, reached a record $688.6 billion, up 10 percent year over year. Total assets at the nation’s largest discount broker rose to $1.65 trillion, also a record.

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Bank of America’s Global Wealth and Investment Management (GWIM) division, which includes Merrill Lynch, reported its highest earnings since Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill in late 2008, as asset management and brokerage fees rose. Client assets, advisor headcount and advisor productivity all improved in the quarter.

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Advisors and investors are turning to mutual funds with more flexible mandates to cushion their portfolios against the unknowns. During the first quarter, $12.2 billion went into global flexible funds, compared to $8.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Lipper. In addition, investors put $8.1 billion into multi-sector bond funds, which includes unconstrained bond funds, up from $1.7 billion in inflows during the prior quarter, Lipper said.

One motivator is all the bad events and worries making headlines. Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, has been utterly disrupted by earthquakes; the Middle East is a cauldron of political unrest; Europe has a sovereign debt crisis; and, the U.S. is running huge deficits. On top of that, investors are also looking to protect their portfolio against interest rate and inflation risks.

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