The major earthquakes appear to be over. Let's hope the aftershocks are behind us as well, now that a new year has arrived.

As new owners put their imprints on Merrill Lynch and Wachovia, as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs assume the mantles of bank holding companies, as Citi's Smith Barney mulls its future, advisors at the brokerage firms once known as wirehouses increasingly find themselves asking the question: Should I stay or should I go?

After 11 years at Merrill Lynch & Co., Jim Pratt-Heaney, now a principal at LLBH Group Private Wealth Management in Westport, Conn., decided to go. He and his $1 billion team chose to make their move ahead of the changes coming to Merrill with its acquisition by Bank of America. On October 20 they opened their own registered investment advisory firm with the help of Focus Financial Partners.

"We found that we just couldn't do what we wanted to do for our clients under the constraints of a major brokerage house," Pratt-Heaney told me in a telephone interview. "All the exclusivity the wirehouses had offered is gone," he declared. "I have better technology here because I chose it myself. We can make decisions faster. We don't have to wait eight or more months for approval."

Rudy Adolf, the chief executive officer of Focus Financial Partners, which shepherded LLBH into the RIA fold, is betting that the ongoing crisis in the traditional wirehouse world will only lead to growth in his.

"It used to be a good thing to be a client of Wirehouse X," Adolf says. "That's no longer the case." Focus, a group of fiduciary wealth managers based in New York and San Francisco, intends to attract a small, elite group of advisors who have at least $400 million in assets under management, adhere to the higher standard of fiduciaries and come from a wirehouse.

Pratt-Heaney and his three partners convinced 97% of their 200 high-net-worth clients to move with them from Merrill. Focus has helped the new, fee-based RIA with technology, custodians and much more.

The Focus/LLBH scenario epitomizes what's happening in the brokerage industry, a trend that we examine this month in our 10th Annual On Wall Street Recruiters Roundtable. We have a 10-page story dedicated to that discussion in which a panel of nine headhunters extol the virtues of regionals, independent firms and other alternative models. They discuss the levels of the recruiting and retention deals available to advisors. They debate the seismic shifts that have transformed wirehouses, and suggest that this model still has a future-albeit a difficult one.

Wirehouses are under attack as the number of competitors grow, seeking to lure their best advisors—and wealthiest clients—away. Consider this. In December, Pershing at The Bank of New York Mellon announced a new practice management program to assist wirehouse advisors who want to go independent or become an RIA or assume some other structure.

As one of our recruiter/panelists said: "For the first time, the real high-net-worth, very successful broker is going independent—usually as an RIA rather than going through a broker-dealer."

Let's see if that pace accelerates and the aftershocks continue in 2009.

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