Wall Street advisors moving -- primarily to firms like the ones they'd left. Bank of America's Merrill Lynch last week pulled in medium and small producers from UBS' U.S. retail brokerage and from Wells Fargo Advisors (formerly Wachovia Securities).

Bank of America acquired Merrill at the beginning of this year.

Wirehouse advisors have been more itchy-footed than usual recently, propelled by brand and share-price erosion. Although financial stocks have had a good few weeks of late, the sector remains sharply depressed.

Brokers Robert Duncan and Brad Newman, a team with $320 million in client assets at UBS, joined Merrill's Westlake Village, Calif., office. Duncan was with UBS and its predecessor firms for about 15 years; Newman was there for about 13 years.

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Merrill Lynch also added ex-UBS brokers Marc Stuckart and David Ruckno -- a team with $112 million in client assets -- in Hilton Head, S.C. Stuckart and Ruckno were at UBS for seven and nines years respectively.

Still in its Hilton Head, Merrill recently brought in ex- Wells Fargo brokers George Spears, Richard Woollacott and John Brighton, who together managed 150 million in client assets.

Spears worked at Wachovia Securities and predecessor firms for 14 years, Woollacott was an 11-year veteran of Wachovia, and Brighton spent nearly nine years at Wachovia and its predecessor firms.

Citigroup's Smith Barney, which is headed into a retail-brokerage joint venture with Morgan Stanley recently brought Golan Yehuda over from Wells Fargo Advisors.

Yehuda, who works for Smith Barney in New York, had $178 million in client assets when he was with Wells Fargo.

Atypical

Last month Alcoa, Tenn.-based LeConte Wealth Management hired former Merrill broker Andy Oakes as its head of financial-planning. The addition brings LeConte's professional-staff headcount to four.

In his 10 years as a financial-service professional, Oakes worked for Merrill in Knoxville, Tenn., for about 14 months. Before that he developed and implemented a financial-planning platform for Knoxville-based Stanfill Wealth Management. He has also worked at Mineapolis-based American Express Financial Advisors (now Ameriprise) and at Minneapolis-based IDS Life Insurance. He's now registered as an advisor with Commonwealth Financial Network's RIA. -FWR

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