Am I in the right place?

Which is why I am out. F Pershing.

Chief will mention something about them having a prop desk.

If a client goes to TDAmeritrade, or Fidelity, they are going to pay say, 9.99 a trade. And they can trade to their hearts content. On their own.

If they come to you, they are still paying 9.99 a trade Thats for the trade. Then they pay 1% or whatever, of assets to you. Thats for advice you fucking numnut. So they dont blow themselves up. You do think you're advice is worth 1%, don't you? 

Welcome to AH. And no, I'm not trying to be combative. 

It looks like your skin is so not thick enough that its made out of fucking Charmin. Was it the numnuts comment that made you go all Helado on me? Because that, and every other sarcastic part of my post was meant to be funny, not to rip you. I was actually trying to give you an explanation of why the ticket charges made sense, to help you. '

So go fuck yourself, cunt. I've been around here too long to take sandy vaginas like you seriously. 

Edit: Oh, and go take a course on how to interpret emoticons, Edith 

Okay fuckstick, it's apparent to me that you need to learn the rules.

First, of the forum.  You are new here.  You haven't earned the right to be an asshole yet.  So you either get your shit together and respect your elders (and in this case, VERY elder), or you hop back onto what shitwagon you rolled in on, and good luck getting help with your situation somewhere else on the internet.  

Second, on your question.  You got the right advice, but failed to listen because you are a twat.  As an RIA, you will be a fiduciary when working with clients.  You will likely not have custody of your client funds, so you will have to pick a firm to handle that for you.  The main players are the discount brokers, plus Pershing.  They don't do this for free.  They make their money by doing trades.  $10 a trade.  You get the point.  They also do this through revenue sharing with fund and ETF companies through their "No Transaction Fee" or NTF programs.  Essentially, the fund/ETF company agrees to kick some revenue back to the custodian (Fidelity, Pershing, whoever) in exchange for the custodian not charging fees for clients (or advisors) to trade/hold those funds there.  Usually this means the custodian gets a 12b-1 fee of 25 bps, but that's not always the case (obviously with ETF providers that isn't the case). 

The custodians will also negotiate an asset based fee with RIAs for unlimited trading (i.e. every account can trade free on an unlimited basis, in exchange for say, 20 basis points annually of the AUM they custody).  20 basis points is .20% in case you're slow (which you clearly are).  

So if you are going to do the AUM fee arrangement, it's easy.  No conflicts of interest.  Trade, don't trade.  Stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, whatever.  You know you're giving Fidelity 20 bps a year no matter what, so you build that into your fee structure.  Say you charge 1.20%, Fidelity bills .2% for themselves, and sends you the other 1.00%.  

Now, what if you are doing the "ticket charge" thing?  SOMEONE has to pay $10 for every trade.  So as an RIA you can absorb it, or you can just have it bill to your clients separately.  So you may say "well duh, I'll charge 1.2% an absorb these charges for my clients, and I should still net 1.0%"  

Sounds great, until you look at the regulatory perspective.  What happens when your accounts are down 20% and a client finds out that you pay these trading costs on their behalf?  What if they decide to allege that you didn't move their money around because it would cost YOU money?  

That is bad.  That leaves you open to liability, even if it's not true.  So what do you do?  YOU aren't charging for trades (you aren't allowed after all, you're not a broker, you're just an advisor).  YOU are charging for your ADVICE, and FIDELITY is charging for TRADES.  So instead of billing 1.20% and covering the Fidelity trading costs out of your pocket, you charge say, 1.00% for your ADVICE and the client pays fidelity for their TRANSACTION costs separately.  

Make sense?  I don't care if it does or not, I'm just telling you how it is.  If you're smart, you'll STFU and listen to me because I'm a fucking genius.  But you aren't, so you'll probably ignore this sage advice and focus on the fact that I called you a shitstick (or fuckstick, whatever).  

But that would be unwise.  Because if financial advisors were cartoons, I'm G.I. Joe or maybe even Transformers, and at this point, you are My Little Pony.  

So get your shit together, learn your place, and MAYBE, just MAYBE we'll let you stay here and get an education about this industry that doesn't exist anywhere else in the industry, including the training programs at the biggest firms on Wall Street.

You're welcome.  

Moral of the story - don't piss off SportsFreakowitz!