November is National Entrepreneurship Month, a time to celebrate innovation and the courage it takes to start something new. Many aspiring entrepreneurs have great ideas, but taking the first steps can feel daunting – especially during such uncertain times.The Small Business Optimism Index dipped to 98.2 in October but remained above its long-term average, while the Uncertainty Index fell to its lowest level this year. With confidence stabilizing but caution still present, practical guidance is essential for entrepreneurs embarking on their business journey. The truth is, entrepreneurship can take many forms: starting something new from scratch, stepping into a franchise…

Team Name: SiRiCa Wealth Management Group Firm: Merrill Wealth Management Senior Members: Todd Silaika, Erick Richardson, Scott Calhoun, Lee Wilson, James Coker Location: Clifton Park, NY Team Custodied Assets: $3.3 billion Background: Todd Silaika took a nontraditional path to advising. Raised in Schenectady, N.Y., he worked full-time at a convention center while attending Hudson Valley Community College, then graduated summa cum laude from SUNY Albany’s business school in 1992—paying his own way through a recession. After persuading a firm executive who was visiting the convention center he worked at to give him a shot—“if you don’t ask, the answer’s always…

Team Name: Payne & Mencias Group Firm: Merrill Wealth Management Senior Members: Eric Payne, Ron Mencias Location: Indianapolis, IN Team Custodied Assets: $3.2 billion Background: Eric Payne and Ron Mencias met as young CPAs at Ernst & Young in 1997. Payne, a Butler University graduate and CPA, joined Merrill in 1999. Mencias—born and raised in Indianapolis and Notre Dame tennis alum—left EY in 1999 for PaineWebber’s training program, earned his MBA at night from Butler University, then teamed up with Payne at Merrill in 2002. Today the Payne & Mencias Group counts 16 team members serving roughly 500 families. Client…

Team Name: The Continuum Group Firm: Morgan Stanley Wealth Management Senior Members: Scott Siegel, Steven Rosbash, Bill DeMatteo, Joseph Carmody, Jaynie Siegel Location: New York, NY Team Custodied Assets: $7.5 billion Background: Scott Siegel began his career in 1984 on the institutional fixed-income side before shifting to Bear Stearns in 1997 to advise high-net-worth clients. After Bear’s acquisition by JPMorgan, he led J.P. Morgan Securities while maintaining his client practice, joining Morgan Stanley in 2013 to build what is now The Continuum Group. Steven Rosbash, a former Goldman Sachs credit trader and Millennium portfolio manager, joined in 2014 and serves…

Team Name: Roseate Group Firm: Wells Fargo Advisors Senior Members: Robert Vingi, Jr., David McCallum, Howard D. Edwards, Wendy Brewer, Aaron L. Barber Location: Charleston, SC Team Custodied Assets: $3 billion Background: Founded in 2003 by Robert Vingi Jr. and Howard D. Edwards, the Roseate Group of Wells Fargo Advisors has grown into a ten-member wealth-management practice in Charleston, South Carolina. David McCallum joined the team that same year after starting his career with Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), where he helped open a private-client office in Chicago. Soon after, Aaron L. Barber, joined as an analyst and portfolio manager…

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…