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RIA founders choosing among consolidators, and the M&A advisers working for them, should rank buyers on what they close. In the 90 days to Oct. 26, wealth managers announced 156 deals and closed 50. Hightower and Wealth Enhancement announced three apiece and closed none. An announcement count prices an option, and the option belongs to the buyer. It can arrange the loan, or not. It can wire the deposit, or not. The seller gets paid on the close.
Mercer Advisors went into that window with its money already priced. It refinanced $1.9 billion of debt into a syndicated term loan and added a $340 million revolver. Hightower's three announcements carried $3.5 billion of disclosed client assets, and none had closed by Oct. 26. Both firms buy RIAs for a living. Only one of them, on this record, could show a seller a borrowing cost with a date on it.
That gap is the whole negotiation. An announcement tells a founder what the market thinks of a buyer. A close tells the founder whether the wire arrives and, a year later, whether the people who sold to that buyer are still in their chairs. The coverage of this period reports no trailing-12-month close rate for any of these acquirers, and the record it does hold is 90 days deep. Sellers are being asked to judge a counterparty on the one number the counterparty never has to make good on.
By the numbers
The 90 days to Oct. 26, 2026
- Deals recorded
- 206
- Announced
- 156
- Closed
- 50
- With disclosed client assets
- 69
Source: Private Wealth Daily Deal Tracker
The announcement is the cheapest thing a consolidator makes#
Across the 206 deals dated in the window, 156 were announcements and 50 were closings. The announcement is the cheap half of the business. It puts a firm into the coverage and into the next founder's inbox, and it costs a press release. Closing takes capital and the integration staff who actually move the accounts.
The headline count also carries less information than its prominence suggests. Of the 206 deals, 137 disclosed no client assets at all, and among the 69 that did, the median was $947 million. The number that gets counted and ranked usually has no size attached.
Where size is disclosed, it is mostly modest: 36 deals fell under $1 billion of client assets. Attention is the scarce input in any pipeline, and a long list spreads it thin.
Counts inflate in ordinary, documented ways. Captrust's Long Island double deal was two RIAs that had worked side by side since 2018, both of which will drop their own names. Nobody did anything wrong. It is still a reason not to rank buyers by the tally.
The tally moves with the mood of sellers more than the competence of buyers. DeVoe & Company counted 72 RIA transactions announced through Sept. 22, 19% below the same stretch of 2025. The first quarter of 2026 had matched the all-time quarterly high at 93 deals before the count slipped to 74 in the second. A series that swings that hard in six months is measuring when founders decided to go to market. Private Wealth Daily's report on the DeVoe figures puts the gap between a decision to sell and an announcement at six to 18 months, so a market shock turns up in the count a year after it hits the tape.
None of this makes the count worthless. It is a fair gauge of seller sentiment and the only number anyone can publish on a fixed date. As a guide to who pays, it is close to useless.
- Deals recorded
- 206
- Announced
- 156
- Closed
- 50
- With disclosed client assets
- 69
- Median disclosed client assets
- $947 million
Source: Private Wealth Daily Deal Tracker
The biggest column in this table is the blank one: 137 of the 206 deals disclose nothing about client assets.
Most deals in the window disclosed no client assets
Show as table
| Label | Value (deals) |
|---|---|
| Under $1B | 36 deals |
| $1B–$5B | 24 deals |
| $5B–$20B | 6 deals |
| $20B and up | 3 deals |
| Size not disclosed | 137 deals |
Committed capital sorted the closers from the announcers#
Merit Financial Advisors announced four deals carrying $4.2 billion of disclosed client assets and closed three of them. Modern Wealth Management closed all three it announced. Hightower announced three carrying $3.5 billion and closed none, and AlphaCore did the same on three smaller deals. Two buyers with similar disclosed books finished the window three closings apart. Read down the middle columns and the list of busiest acquirers stops ranking appetite. It ranks completion.
Deals by acquirer, the 90 days to 2026-10-26
- Merit Financial Advisors4
- Hightower3
- Beacon Pointe Advisors3
- Modern Wealth Management3
- Wealth Enhancement3
- AlphaCore Wealth Advisory3
- CAPTRUST3
- Concurrent2
- Waverly Advisors2
- HB Wealth2
- Stratos Wealth Enterprises2
- Schwab Advisor Services2
Show as table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Merit Financial Advisors | 4 |
| Hightower | 3 |
| Beacon Pointe Advisors | 3 |
| Modern Wealth Management | 3 |
| Wealth Enhancement | 3 |
| AlphaCore Wealth Advisory | 3 |
| CAPTRUST | 3 |
| Concurrent | 2 |
| Waverly Advisors | 2 |
| HB Wealth | 2 |
| Stratos Wealth Enterprises | 2 |
| Schwab Advisor Services | 2 |
The buyer with a perfect record in the window, Modern Wealth, announced exactly as many deals as the two firms that closed none.
Capital is what separates them, and capital leaves a paper trail. Mercer, with $111 billion in client assets, went into the syndicated loan market for the first time to replace private debt, and the refinancing cut its debt cost by 175 basis points. Its $1.65 billion loan priced at 2.75 percentage points over the floating-rate benchmark and carried a $250 million delayed-draw term loan that will go toward acquisitions and other investments. A delayed draw is committed money waiting for a purchase agreement. An announcement is a purchase agreement waiting for money.
Finishing is also a habit a seller can inspect deal by deal. Merit's $1.1 billion Moldenhauer & Associates purchase closed Sept. 25 for a mix of cash and equity, and Brett Moldenhauer and the firm's 12 employees stayed in the Orchard Park, N.Y., office. It was the 10th time Merit had bought a firm formerly affiliated with Commonwealth. Beacon Pointe's $1 billion WorthPointe purchase closed without founder Christopher Van Slyke, who will not join and is pursuing other projects, according to a Beacon Pointe spokesperson. Both deals closed. Only one kept the principal.
Beacon Pointe, backed by KKR, crossed $70 billion in assets with its three October deals. That is a buyer working at scale, with a founder walking out of a deal it finished. A seller weighing Beacon Pointe does not have to wonder whether retention can slip at that firm. It already has.
Hightower's pipeline has its own shape. The Bahnsen Group, a Hightower company, agreed to add Hightower Naples, a $1.1 billion Florida practice, under its franchise brand, with a close expected at the end of the year. David Bahnsen pitched it as the first of several.
A perfect first acquisition for us – and it won't be the last.
David Bahnsen, The Bahnsen Group, in an email to AdvisorHub
A Hightower company buying a Hightower practice is what a franchise model is built to produce: a hub with its own brand and its own acquisition program inside the parent. For the seller, it means the person across the table can sit one step removed from the balance sheet that eventually pays.
Closing lags excuse some zeros, but not the gap between buyers#
The best case against this argument is real, and it starts with the calendar. Closings trail signings by months across the whole market. CohnReznick's deal for Aldrich's $8 billion wealth practice was announced Oct. 14 and is slated to close in mid-December. T. Rowe Price's $19 billion purchase of F/m Investments, announced Aug. 20, is expected to close in early 2027. Alto's agreement to buy Forge Trust from Schwab still needs approval from the South Dakota Division of Banking. Any 90-day window will show those three as unfinished, and correctly so.
The dates are fuzzy at both ends, too. Concurrent's Spire Investment Partners purchase is dated as closed Sept. 30 and as announced Oct. 1. Hightower said in September that its Sandy Cove deal was expected to close that day, yet no Hightower close falls inside the window. Records like these argue for a longer measuring period, whatever the explanation behind each one.
The objection bites hardest where a firm's own history contradicts the window. Concede the point in full. A zero in one quarter is a prompt to ask, never a verdict.
The lag still cannot explain the spread inside the window. Hightower's latest deal and Merit's latest deal carry the same date, Oct. 8, and one firm has three closings against its name while the other has none. Modern Wealth went three for three with a deal dated Oct. 23, two weeks later than either. Age of announcement does not sort these results.
Announcing first is not misconduct, either. A pipeline is how a consolidator markets itself to the next hundred founders, and Nate Lenz, Concurrent's chief executive, has said the $3 billion to $10 billion range is where the firm expects to keep buying after Spire. The trade press rewards signing early and closing late. The error sits on the seller's side of the table, in reading a count as diligence.
Lenders reward activity as well. A visible pipeline helps keep that door open. It is not the money, and sellers keep treating it as if it were.
We think the honest answer narrows the claim rather than abandons it. Fifty closings is a thin sample for the market and thinner still for any one buyer, so nobody should trust a 90-day close rate on its own. The trailing-12-month figure, deal by deal, is the number to demand. This window cannot supply it, and a buyer cannot fake it.
What it means for advisors#
Pick a pipeline over a closer and the bill arrives later, in the adviser ranks. XY Planning Network has 110 firms working toward registration, up from 60 a year earlier. RIABiz ties part of that surge to advisers leaving rollup-owned firms. A founder who sells to a buyer with a long announcement list and a short closing record risks handing a staff to the recruiting pool that network draws from.
Price that risk in the letter of intent, before anyone books an integration meeting. Start with the trailing-12-month close rate, deal by deal, with announcement and closing dates side by side. Then make the buyer show what finances the offer, down to the loan's size and pricing. Retention and earnout payments need a written answer on how they survive a refinancing and who at the buyer can change them. Get the names of the integration staff on the buyer's last three closings. Call those three sellers and find out whether the person who signed them stayed to the end. A buyer that cannot produce the close rate leaves the seller holding only the announcement count, and nobody should sign on that.
None of this is a state secret. The 12-month record is a list of the buyer's own announcements and its own closings, and a seller is entitled to see it first. Asking costs one email. Skipping it costs whatever the buyer's option turns out to be worth.
A weak buyer is not the only exit. Jim Atwood and Phil Scott left JPMorgan with $18.6 billion in client assets and opened Latigo Peak Partners, funding the launch themselves rather than taking private equity capital. Rosenwald Private Wealth, a $1.1 billion Baltimore team, joined Indivisible Partners, an advisor-owned partnership. A founder with two offers and no outside option negotiates from the weakest seat in the room, which is why the option to stay is worth pricing before the LOI.
The first checkpoints are already public. CohnReznick says Aldrich closes in mid-December. The Bahnsen Group expects Hightower Naples at the end of the year. T. Rowe Price expects F/m in early 2027. A founder opening talks in January should lead with the buyer's conversion record across four quarters and make the buyer explain the pipeline it is still carrying. This argument faces the same clock. If the four-quarter numbers show Hightower and Wealth Enhancement converting at Merit's pace, this window's zeros were timing and the gap between buyers is smaller than it looks today. If the zeros persist, sellers who ranked by announcements handed the buyer a free option.
Written by PWD Editors. Published . Corrections · All long reads