Nine solo moves for every team liftout

PWD's tracking over the past 30 days logged 542 individual advisor moves against 59 team liftouts and 10 breakaways, which means for every team that moves as a unit, nine advisors now change firms alone. The advisor talent war is no longer a team sport.

The industry still narrates itself through the big liftout—the celebrated group crossing from a wirehouse to a rival, the book that lands with a splash—but those moments are the exception. Breakaways, the marquee moves of recruiting season, totaled just 10, or under 2 percent of the movement count, and the churn that actually builds firms is the quiet, one-at-a-time transition.

UBS, with 140 tracked events, is the largest pool of churn in the market; OpenArc Corporate Advisory and OneDigital, at 88 and 69, are aggregators whose event counts suggest books and deals rather than individual hires. Farther at 63 and Tastytrade at 37, by contrast, line up almost entirely with advisor recruiting, while LPL Financial logged 20 events.

For context, the 542 solo moves outpace the 349 deal announcements logged in the same window—talent is moving faster than capital, and in finer increments. A team liftout is a single, lumpy event; a solo move is one line in a high-volume ledger, and the platforms that process those lines are the ones that show up in the destination column.

The talent war has split into two speeds: the large, lumpy event—a team, a book, an acquisition—and the individual, which is nine times as large. OpenArc and OneDigital are building through aggregation, a reminder that the block trade still works, but the ratio says that is no longer where the volume is.

The team liftout is not dead—59 in 30 days is a real number, and a handful of those moves will reshape firms—but the market is moving one advisor at a time, and the platforms that treat talent acquisition as a high-volume, low-friction business are the ones on the right side of the ledger. The wirehouse that bleeds slowly, the aggregator that buys in blocks, and the digital platform that absorbs one at a time are the three characters of this cycle; the data says the third one is winning.