Five breakaway teams land on independent platforms; Fitzgerald Financial discloses $185 million

On Oct. 5, 2026, Wells Fargo FiNet, Cetera, LPL, Kestra and Carson each announced an addition, but of the five multi-adviser teams that landed on independent platforms that day, only Fitzgerald Financial Group arrived with a public asset figure: $185 million.

The Cullman/Holt Group moved from UBS to Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, a seven-advisor practice that includes Conor Holt and Shannon Borton and that PWD's tracking records with a headcount and no asset total. LPL Financial recruited Lakewood Wealth Management from Cambridge Investment Research, a three-advisor team with Justin Pandy, Charles Dobben and Harrison Kennard; Cetera Summit Financial Networks brought in Fitzgerald Financial Group from Commonwealth Financial Network, naming John Fitzgerald, Gary Bolno, Doug Kramer and Tatyana Shevchuk, and that move is the only one of the five with a public dollar amount. Kestra and Carson each added a multi-adviser team the same day, though those entries carry no team name, no advisor count and no asset total.

The day names its movers and hides its scale.

The missing asset totals matter because team size is a weak proxy for client money: the seven-advisor Cullman/Holt Group could be managing several hundred million dollars or several billion, and Lakewood's three advisors could mark a smaller practice or a concentrated one, but no figure appears for either. Only Fitzgerald Financial Group lets a reader connect the people to the balance sheet.

That asymmetry makes the aggregate shift away from UBS, Commonwealth and Cambridge impossible to calculate: a day in which five teams left source firms for independent platforms is a retirement-capital story, but it lacks its most important unit, assets under management. Without dollar figures for four of the five moves, there is no total to compare against prior days and no way to say whether Oct. 5 was an average recruiting day or an unusually large one.

The pattern also obscures where the retirement money is consolidating: a seven-advisor UBS team and a four-person Commonwealth practice may represent very different client bases, yet the Oct. 5 announcements offer no way to tell which of the five receiving platforms gained the most assets. FiNet added the largest team by headcount, Cetera disclosed the largest dollar figure, and Kestra and Carson remain blanks — not a dispute over one missing field but a reporting gap in how breakaway moves get announced.

Some of that gap may be temporary: deals announced on the day a team signs often precede the actual transfer of client assets, and a platform may not want to state a figure before the transition completes. But the Oct. 5 data gives no indication that the other four teams will later disclose amounts — the coverage simply does not say.

A more likely explanation is that independent platforms now recruit teams without public asset figures as a matter of course; the single disclosure reads as a residual practice from an earlier era of recruiting announcements.

For retirement clients, the effect is subtle: they do not need an AUM figure to follow their advisor. For custodians sizing their pipelines, aggregators valuing practices, and source firms measuring attrition, though, the absence of dollar figures makes an already noisy market harder to read.

For now, the day's known arithmetic is three named source firms, five receiving platforms, and one disclosed asset total: $185 million.