Commonwealth advisors head to Raymond James, Cetera

The Manning Companies, a five-advisor group in San Diego, California, has joined Raymond James Financial Services, the firm’s channel for independent advisors. The advisors had previously managed $1.1 billion at Commonwealth Financial Network.

Commonwealth has seen quite a few large teams head for the door since it was bought in August by its former industry rival LPL Financial. Easily one of the biggest beneficiaries of those departures has been Raymond James, which has announced teams recruited from Commonwealth virtually every week since the purchase deal closed.

Separately this week, Raymond James announced it had gone to Commonwealth again to pull over a firm named Pioneer Valley Financial Group. The six-person team had previously managed $660 million in Ludlow, Massachusetts.

The team is led by Edward Sokolowski, who started in 1992 at Equitable and moved to Commonwealth in 1999.

A big question hanging over the acquisition of Commonwealth has been how many of the firm’s advisors and how much of its assets under management LPL will be able to retain. LPL has set itself the ambitious goal of transferring over 90% of the 2,900 advisors and $285 billion in assets the Commonwealth had when the purchase plans were announced.

In a recent report, the industry analyst Steven Chubak of Wolfe Research said Commonwealth appears to have lost about 5% of its headcount since the LPL purchase. Chubak expressed optimism LPL would meet its retention goal.

“Our team has been monitoring [Commonwealth] trends quite closely, and while [Commonwealth] attrition has picked up these last three months, that’s consistent with prior deal seasonality where attrition accelerates 3 to 6 months post announcement,” Chubak wrote. 

Meanwhile, Raymond James announced it’s boosting its channel for independent advisors with an 11-advisor team recruited from Equitable Advisors. The members of Southwest Wealth Strategies had formerly managed $850 million at Equitable Advisors, which came in at the No. 9 spot in Financial Planning’s ranking of the largest independent broker-dealers by revenue. Southwest Wealth Strategies has its headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and offices in Las Vegas, Nevada; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Bozeman, Montana.

The team is led by managing partner John Arnold and senior partners Ray Dimuzio, Mark Asher, Chris Lanier, Ben Miles and Nick Obie. 

Equitable Advisors, based in New York, is the wealth management arm of Equitable Financial Life Insurance. Its parent company is Equitable Holdings, which was spun off from the French insurer AXA in 2018 and which now also has a controlling stake in the research and private wealth firm AllianceBernstein. Equitable Advisors has more than $100 billion in assets under administration and roughly 4,500 financial professionals in the U.S.

Raymond James, which came in at the No. 5 spot in this year’s IBD Elite ranking, had 8,787 advisors when it last reported a headcount, in October 2024. Of those, 3,826 were direct employees and 4,961 were independent contractors.