Full-service brokers offer that sort of account at fees of about 2% of assets under management.
They collected information from quarterly and annual reports, and newspapers, but were dependent on full-service brokers.
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Indeed, thanks to the bull market, the proportion of investors' assets managed by full-service brokers has been growing.
So far, traditional full-service brokers have resisted using the Internet in any way that would cannibalise their existing offline brokerage business.
Full-service brokers are another option, but relationships within the firm itself matter.
Now that investors can get advice and market information from many sources other than full-service brokers, they are less willing to pay a premium just to trade.
That makes many buyers' agents steer their clients elsewhere either in solidarity with full-service brokers or because they fear a discounter will leave them with the lion's share of the work.
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The full-service brokers are changing too, partly to meet the challenge of Schwab and others, partly because it is harder to get away with the juicy trading commissions they used to charge clients.
So as many as half the full-service firms' brokers will effectively be marginalised.
Moreover, much of the growth in online trading seems to result from investors doing more trades and keeping less of their money in the bank, rather than from e-brokers gaining clients at the expense of full-service firms.
The full-service firms say that they are confident that the personal advice offered by their brokers, along with the quality of their research, justifies their much higher costs.
Financial services firms that rely on brokers and advisors face a threat from online channels which are accumulating assets faster than full service firms, partly because of the growing popularity of passive investments such as index funds and ETFs, he added.
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