Tony Sirriani buys AdvisorHUB

Brooke’s Note: Tony Sirianni and I were college classmates. He next appeared on my radar screen when he boldly sought to take dozens of disenfranchised wirehouse branch managers and make them the nexus of an RIA roll-up. In 2008 and 2009, Wall Street fired branch managers in droves, seeing them as an easy expense to eliminate. Sirianni bet that they could double as recruiting magnets and managers in an advisor roll-up. See: Revenge of the branch managers: Washington Wealth is rapidly putting ex-wirehouse workers in play nationwide. His fascination with making treasure out of another man’s discard is back in evidence as he invests in the remnants of AdvisorHUB with faith and vision. This new ownership could be good. It could also be bad. Whenever talk turns to creative “monetization” in advisor publications it virtually always means new and clever ways to sell out journalistic credibility and/or the reader’s sanity. The credibility sellout generally goes by the name of sponsored content these days — the practice of plunking fake paid-for articles next to real ones. In its more pernicious form, it manifests in publications declining to ask hard questions. The reader’s sanity sellout is what you see when you go to a site and advertisements take over the page and leave you waiting — blood pressure rising. As the need to hold providers to RIAs accountable only continues to rise, the number of hard questions being asked by journalists has been on the decline. Call that reluctance some form of Stockholm Syndrome, the built-in excuse of the difficult economics of selling advertising to people you sometimes need to criticize or the limitations of collecting a toll from readers. But it’s real. And it’s not healthy.