Wirehouse Advisor Losses Surge in First Half of 2026
More than 11,000 advisors changed firms in 2025, driven by acquisitions, higher transition deals and expanding affiliation models. But 2026 is shaping up to be even more active for advisor movement, according to the latest Advisor Transition Report from Diamond Consultants.
The report focuses specifically on wirehouse advisor movement and found that 1,449 experienced advisors left the four wirehouses—Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wells Fargo—in the first half of 2026. The four firms gained 932 advisors, resulting in a net loss of 517 advisors.
“Put another way, the wirehouses lost more advisors on a net basis in the first half of 2026 than they did during all of 2025,” the report states.
But that headcount number doesn’t tell the whole story, the report argues. For one, it doesn’t capture the size of wirehouse teams that are leaving. Some 41 teams managing $500 million or more in assets left a wirehouse in the first half. That includes 20 teams with $1 billion or more. Twelve of those 41 teams moved to another wirehouse.
“A billion-dollar team, a corner office wirehouse team should get the best service, a really high payout,” said Jason Diamond, president of Diamond Consultants. “They should have a direct relationship with the most senior leaders at the firm. Their clients should be really well taken care of, and they have the most to lose by leaving because their business is growing. … But the fact that so many of them are leaving tells us that they’ve kind of flipped that equation on its head, and they look at it as, ‘Yes, we have a lot to lose, but we also have so much to gain.’”
That headline number also masks differences by firm. Merrill Lynch and UBS experienced net losses in headcount of 404 and 182 during the first six months of the year, while Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley had net gains of 46 and 23 advisors during the period.
Diamond noted that Morgan Stanley has been the steadiest performer in the group for several years, doing the best job managing attrition and consistently adding advisors over the last five years. In addition, the firm’s advisors have been growing very fast, as the wirehouse feeds them leads from its workplace business.
Wells Fargo was this year’s biggest winner, he added, as the firm has gotten further away from its consumer banking scandal. The report excludes internal affiliation changes from its recruiting data, but it counted another 135 advisors moving between Wells channels in the first half.
“That flexibility is an important differentiator,” the report states. “Wells is currently the only wirehouse that gives advisors the ability to move from an employee model to an independent affiliation without leaving the broader firm. For advisors whose needs change as their businesses evolve, having both models under one roof creates a form of optionality its wirehouse peers do not currently offer.”
And while Merrill lost many advisors, the report states the number is misleading because over 100 of its advisors went to J.P. Morgan, an indication that they are bank advisors from the Bank of America side and not the ones Diamond is trying to capture in this report.
“Even if you strip those out, we’re talking about a big number of advisors leaving Merrill,” Diamond said. “The frustrations around Merrill are the same as they’ve always been since they were bought by Bank of America, which is the culture has changed considerably. It’s no longer Merrill. It’s now this bureaucratic bankified place where there’s pressures to cross sell, and ‘they change our payouts’ and things like that.”
Diamond is more optimistic for Merrill for next year.
UBS was the clear loser for the period because, even though it didn’t lose the most advisors, it has the smallest base of all the wires. He attributes it to issues with the culture, ease of doing business and an outdated platform. There are also questions about UBS’s commitment to the U.S. wealth management business.
Overall, the data showed that the independent channel is capturing more wirehouse advisors, with 46% of advisors leaving the four firms choosing an independent model, versus 24% who moved laterally to another wirehouse, down substantially from 2025 and roughly half the historical wirehouse capture rate.
“Independent options (including both broker/dealers and hybrid RIAs) remain the most popular affiliation choices among wirehouse advisors on the move,” the report said. “If these figures hold for the year, it will mark the largest share of independent movement we have seen from the wirehouses.”
That said, employee options remain the dominant choice for wirehouse advisors on the move, with 54% moving to W-2 models, with Raymond James, Rockefeller Capital Management and RBC Wealth being the biggest beneficiaries of that trend, Diamond said.
Of all wirehouse advisors who moved in the first half, 76% of them left the wirehouse channel, the report states.
The report also pointed out that more than 200 firms recruited at least one wirehouse advisor during the first half of 2026, whether that’s other wirehouses, regional firms, independent broker/dealers, independent platforms and RIAs.
“It shows what we’ve been saying for years now, which is there is more legitimate, quality choice for wirehouse advisors than there has ever been,” Diamond said. “It’s certainly a far cry from the world where your choices were, ‘Let me go to Smith Barney, or I’m going to stay put.’”
