March / April 2026 • www. fa-mag. com

What To Do With A Depressed Client

How can you talk with retirees who feel they’ ve lost purpose?

Are You Doing International All Wrong? The risk of investing overseas isn’ t what you think it is.

How Well Do You Know Roth Conversions? This man wants to test you.

KNOWLEDGE FOR THE SOPHISTICATED ADVISOR

Women In Planning

The advisory world is changing, and its female leaders know that more than anyone.

COLD, NASTY WINTER IS COMING TO AN END, AND FOR many it can’ t end too soon. Nothing lasts forever, and it looks like a season of transition is at hand.

As of March 5, the equal weight S & P 500 was up about 4 % while its market-cap-weighted version is basically flat. Some cynics already are rechristening the fabled Mag 7 as the Lag 7.

Still, it was a great musical score. Diversification once again is working.

In this month’ s issue, Financial Advisor takes a look at a world in flux, and that also goes for the subject of our cover story: a look at women in planning. Though the percentage of female advisors remains stubbornly stuck in the 20 % to 30 % range, it would certainly appear that there are more women in positions of authority than there were several decades ago. But maybe that’ s an illusion.

In the early days of the profession in the 1980s, a group of smart, forwardthinking women played a major role in building this business. The industry was so small and fragmented at the time that no one gave their minority status any thought. That has changed.

Sometimes, however, looking at trends in financial advice feels like watching a replay of the same movie. As senior editor Eric Rasmussen notes in this year’ s broker-dealer survey, a decade ago everyone was talking about how roboadvisors would displace human financial advisors, male and female, altogether.

Now it’ s another shiny gadget. In February, an imaginative upstart custodian, Altruist, introduced a clever AI-based tax tool named Hazel. To the surprise of many, it caused a one-day earthquake in the stocks of brokerages and custodians like LPL Financial, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley and Raymond James Financial.

What Hazel did to firms that service wealth managers, Anthropic did to software giants like Microsoft and Salesforce. AI is threatening to reshape many

In the early days of the profession in the 1980s, a group of smart, forward-thinking women played a major role in building this business.

Kristen Bauer CEO LNW Seattle

industries— and the threat is real— but the likelihood that it will expunge most of American industry is questionable at best.

That doesn’ t mean numerous longtime professions aren’ t re-examining their viability amid swift changes. And that goes not only for areas like technology but tax law. As Financial Advisor contributor Jay Darby reports from this year’ s Heckerling Institute conference, estate planners find themselves rethinking their own raison d’ être. With the federal estate tax now exempting families with less than $ 30 million, that tax might now be relevant to only 200,000 or so families.

Yet as Darby writes, there are always a lot of changes going on in that area, and advisors need to keep up with them. Before the professionals panic, it’ s worth remembering that trust and estate attorneys wrote wills for centuries before a federal estate tax was enacted in 1916.

Indeed, it’ s hard to find an industry that isn’ t likely to experience turbulence over the next few years. Advisors are hardly alone.

Evan Simonoff

Email me at esimonoff @ famagazine. com with your opinion.

6 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | MARCH / ARPIL 2026 WWW. FA-MAG. COM