Atlanta’s newest RIA firm, MartinWright Advisory, launched Monday with seven employees and a clear mission: Bringing institutional-caliber investment management to complex families—and building an advisor-led ownership model designed to last. The firm’s founders, Margaret Wright and Bradley Martin, are both in their 40s and are well-known in the city’s wealth management circles. Between them, they previously managed more than $4.5 billion in cumulative client assets at Truist and Balentine, respectively. Now, they’re betting their combined experience can anchor a new independent firm—one focused on deep customization, next-generation technology and clearly mapped advisor succession planning. MartinWright will custody with Goldman Sachs…

When Nedra Agnew was working in the U.S. foreign service, her trajectory seemed clear: she was on a path that could one day have led to an ambassadorship. Then, in the early 2000s, her partner at the time was a financial advisor and was looking for a trainee with a CFP to join his team. She wasn’t looking for another job at the time, but Agnew specialized in administrative work, crisis management and dealing with people. “I remember having the thought, there’s no reason why I can’t be successful in this career,” she recalls. She took a meeting with a…

State Street’s chief investment strategist, Michael Arone, says he’s still bullish on the market heading into 2026—just not comfortably so. “I’m uncomfortably bullish,” Arone said last Thursday to a crowded room of wealth managers at the Forbes/SHOOK Top Advisor Summit at the Wynn Las Vegas. “We’re going to get stimulus from the One Big Beautiful Bill—with a big tax refund next season, more rate cuts from the Fed, and continued double-digit earnings growth,” he said. “That’s a powerful combination but the margin for error is small.” With the S&P 500 hovering near record highs and trading around 26 times trailing…

A widespread outage at Amazon Web Services on Monday reverberated through the global economy, offering a stark reminder of the financial industry’s deep dependence on a handful of tech giants. The disruption, primarily centered on AWS’s massive US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia, caused connectivity issues and elevated error rates for thousands of companies worldwide, immediately disrupting financial services on trading platforms and consumer banking apps, among others.The incident, attributed by AWS engineers to an issue within the EC2 internal network and later tied to a Domain Name System failure, quickly became a global systemic risk test for finance. Cryptocurrency exchange…

In the 1990s, Muhlenkamp Fund’s clever value investing formula made it a star among no load mutual funds. Then the long tech bull market left it in the dust. A new generation is making a comeback. Twenty years ago Wexford, PA-based Muhlenkamp Fund was a perennial star on Forbes annual mutual fund Honor Roll list. Year-after-year it bested the S&P 500 using a low risk investment formula seeking large and small cap companies whose return on equity surpassed their price-earnings ratios and whose revenue growth was at least 10% a year. It owned stocks like Ford, Alaska Airlines and Lockheed…

Lawrence Golub, billionaire founder and CEO of private credit firm Golub Capital, emphatically dismissed fears that the rapid growth of private credit, specifically direct lending, is leading to a bubble. Speaking at the ninth annual Forbes/SHOOK Top Advisor Summit in Las Vegas, NV, on Friday, Golub argued that direct lending continues to offer investors superior risk-adjusted returns and acts as a necessary hedging tool for traditional 60/40 portfolios with stocks and bonds. “It’s for sure not a bubble,” he said to a room full of financial advisors. Golub asserted that an allocation to private credit and direct lending improves the…

A palpable sense of optimism is returning to Wall Street, as the long-dormant engine of high-stakes dealmaking roars back to life. Investment banking revenues at the financial district’s five largest institutions, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which will be announced later this week, are poised to break through the $9 billion threshold in the third quarter for the first time since 2021.This resurgence marks a dramatic turnaround, representing a 13% increase from a year ago and a staggering 50% recovery from the lows of 2023, according to Bloomberg. While still shy of the record…

“I want to make it really clear, OK? We’re not going to buy back a lot of stock at these prices,” said billionaire JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon during the bank’s annual meeting in May of 2024. “Buying back stock of a financial company greatly in excess of two times tangible book is a mistake. We aren’t going to do it.” At the time, JPMorgan’s shares traded at 2.4 times their tangible book value, a measure of a bank’s market price compared to its tangible net worth. That figure strips out goodwill and other intangibles and focuses on assets that…

Firm: RFG Advisory Name: Shannon Spotswood Location: Vestavia Hills, AL Team Custodied Assets: $5.8 billion Background: Shannon Spotswood grew up in Seattle after being born in Nashville and knew from an early age she wanted a career on Wall Street. By the time she was 14, she had asked her parents for a subscription to The Wall Street Journal. After double-majoring in economics and political science at the University of Arizona, she moved to San Francisco to pursue finance. Her early roles included investment banking at Volpe Brown Whelan, where she worked on the Netscape IPO—the first internet IPO—and portfolio…

Firm: Alaska Wealth Advisors Name: Dave Valdez Location: Anchorage, AK Team Custodied Assets: $934 million Background: Anchorage native Dave Valdez immigrated to the United States with his family from the Philippines in 19tk. His mother worked for the State of Alaska and would save every dividend check from Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payment distributed to residents from the state’s oil revenues, to put him through college. Valdez earned an undergraduate finance degree from Seattle University and a master’s from the University of Alaska Anchorage. After working for Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade, and consulting for hedge funds and…