Week's Best: Schwab Hikes Minimum for Client Referrals — Barrons.com

By Barron's Advisor StaffBeginning next year, Charles Schwab will only refer clients with $5 million or more in investible assets to external financial advisors. That threshold is more than twice the current minimum of $2 million and is the second recent increase to minimum account size for the Schwab Advisor Network, or SAN, a program that refers clients to third-party registered investment advisors who use Schwab as a custodian. Earlier this year, the minimum account size jumped from $500,000 to $2 million. The latest change comes as increasingly wealthy clients are taking advantage of the program, Schwab says.Among other most-read wealth management articles this week:Prison for former Fidelity advisor. A former Fidelity Investments advisor has been sentenced to six years and eight months for stealing more than $2 million from an elderly client. According to prosecutors, Eric Stone befriended a 75-year-old client and tricked her into sending him more than $2 million, much of which he spent on foreign gambling websites. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering in March.Vanguard to buy Altruist, shaking up industry. Asset-management giant Vanguard wants to be bigger in wealth management, and on Wednesday it took a step toward that goal by agreeing to acquire Altruist, a fintech company that provides technology and a trading platform to registered investment advisors. The acquisition puts Vanguard in direct competition with Charles Schwab and Fidelity in the RIA custody business.Best advice as Treasury yields spike. Long-term bond yields have risen to eye-catching levels thanks to concerns about inflation, federal deficits, heavy Treasury issuance, and other factors. For this week's Barron's Advisor Big Q, we asked financial pros what they recommend clients do with the fixed-income side of their portfolios. For starters, they recommend avoiding long-term bonds and sticking with high-quality credits.Merrill veteran reflects on value and Buffett. "I think Warren Buffett is a genius," an older client told young Merrill Lynch broker James Patrick Rooney in the 1980s. Forty years later, and 10 years into retirement, he reflects on the lessons he's learned about value across the investing landscape. His advice now: A majority of investors should consider selectively paring back on highflying equities while looking to add reasonably valued growth stocks, he writes.Charles Schwab expands crypto offerings. When Schwab started allowing customers to hold and trade cryptocurrencies directly in May, it limited their options to the two largest crypto assets by market capitalization: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now the financial services giant says it will add the digital currencies Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink to the mix. The news comes amid a rebound in prices for some cryptocurrencies after a long downturn.Write to [email protected] content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.