If you are a broker/advisor/client car washer/financial planner (ha) at Morgan Stanley (Smith Barney, Dean Witter), it is like being involved in your own modern version of The Exodus.

Like Charlton Heston, I can imagine the meeting where Morgan Stanley’s CEO stood in front of his troops and declared ‘…’You must own $FB shares…lot’s and lot’s of them‘.

Yet the brokers/advisers/planners/car washers would not leave!

So James came back with the ‘newest’ technologies known to thelands and declared….’You must use and pencil and paper to track your clients‘

It’s all just pathetic.

There have been no frogs, or death of your first born, but your clients have been violated and their money is bleeding out into the streets.

If Moses was looking down on Morgan Stanley $MS he would be licking his chops. It’s so bad at Morgan Stanley that a firm like $LPLA is thriving. I imagine this is the part of the ‘Exodus’ where brokers are ‘wandering’ through the desert from one rickety shop to another, praying to the false god of ‘compliance’ to the detriment of their clients.

I assume the LPL motto is ‘We are not Morgan Stanley’ or ‘Internet Shminternet’…yes it is just that easy to catch brokers leaving their homeland.

It is amazing that the word ‘compliance’ has caused so much pain for clients when it is supposed to protect them. It will continue to do so until it is replaced with the words ‘common sense’ and ‘enforcement’.

The banks have all the money. They have the technology to monitor their employees on the internet. They have more information on each and every client than Facebook. If Aunt Betty owns something peculiar in her portfolio, it should take about three seconds for alarms to go off.

I hope the wandering moves quicker than the original Exodus. Clients and Advisors need a country called ‘Common Sense’.