\tEvery February and March Investment Executive<\/i> researchers pick up their phones and talk to advisors at the country’s 10 largest national investment dealers. They sweet-talk them into committing 20 minutes or so of precious RRSP-season time to rate their respective firm in dozens of categories.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tGrabbing a broker’s time during the last legs of the RRSP season was by all accounts no easy feat for journalists David Fielding and Lara Hertel. But with persistence and a proverbial carrot to dangle \u2013 the survey provides the broker with a chance to speak candidly and anonymously about his or her firm \u2013 they managed to cover the Street.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tThis year there’s a new firm included in our report \u2013 Yorkton Securities Inc. \u2013 and one that has vanished \u2013 Merrill Lynch Canada Inc.<\/b> However, we didn’t want to ignore Merrill altogether so we tracked former Merrill advisors down at CIBC Wood Gundy<\/b>, a division of CIBC Capital Markets Inc.<\/b> and had them complete our survey. We then averaged the former Merrill Lynch broker scores with those of Wood Gundy to come up with an overall score for the newly morphed firm. But we also wanted to look at the two firms separately so we’ve left space further on in our report to take a closer look at how the first few months of the merger have been going.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tWhat we see at this point is generally what happens after an acquisition and during a merger; employees are more critical than they might be otherwise. In last year’s Report Card, Merrill Lynch advisors rated the firm in second place overall, behind only Edward Jones<\/b> (this year’s highest ranked firm). Had Merrill scores been included separately this year, the firm would have fallen to ninth place, joining many other firms that stumbled this year.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tScores across the board have fallen, even for Edward Jones, the annual stalwart in the survey. The St. Louis-based firm has taken top honours in the survey four out of five years since 1998.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tOther notables this year are BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc.<\/b> whose ratings remained relatively stable over last year’s and which managed to jump from a sixth-place ranking to a third. Canaccord Capital Corp.<\/b>, despite recent rumours of mergers and grid-slashing, has remained constant in one of the top three spots for the past three years, and Yorkton’s d\u00e9but secured a fourth-place finish overall by taking top marks for the corporate finance department, branch managers, freedom and the quality of its Web site.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tAdvisors are randomly selected from IE’s mailing list and must have a minimum of one year’s experience in the industry. Using a combination of telephone, fax and online questionnaires, we speak with an average of 40 advisors from each firm. We ask them to rate their employer in 28 categories ranging from how they feel about sales support to the firm’s ethics to the quality of research. Scores are on a scale from zero to 10 (poor to excellent). We then average the broker’s ratings in each category and produce a firm’s overall score for that question.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tTo come up with the IE rating we take the firm’s scores for all categories and average them to determine the highest and lowest-ranked company, then factor in how many times a firm took top marks in a category and adjust its ranking accordingly. IE<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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