Here Are the Top 1200 US Financial Advisors of 2025
3 min
The nation’s Top 1,200 Financial Advisors grew their way to a new milestone.
The advisory teams that made it into this year’s ranking reported total assets under management of $6.1 trillion, for an average of $5.1 billion per team—both record highs for the dozen years during which Barron’s has ranked the Top 1,200. Last year’s ranking had $5.6 trillion in total AUM and $4.6 billion average AUM per team. In the past decade, the 1,200 cohort has increased its total AUM by 135% and its average revenue by 147%.
Amid all the growth, several advisors made big moves in this year’s rankings, including W Janet Dougherty of Cresset in Chicago, who re-entered the ranking at No. 37 in Illinois after moving from J.P. Morgan . Meanwhile, Ash Chopra of Syon Capital in San Francisco jumped 47 spots in California to No. 47; Hillary Cullen of UBS Private Wealth Management in New York rose 20 spots to No. 77; and Jon Neuhaus of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management in Los Angeles moved up 14 spots to No. 6 in California. Fourteen percent of the Top 1,200 advisors didn’t appear in the ranking last year.
Teams Are a Trend
Top advisory practices have ridden a wave of healthy markets, but that is only part of the growth story. Whereas a decade ago many of the best advisors were sole practitioners with modest support staff, now advisors are working in increasingly complex team configurations.
These teams are allowing advisors to provide an array of wealth management services in addition to the investing expertise that usually sits at the heart of their offerings. As teams acquire more skill in estate planning, taxes, lending, and other value-adds, they are attracting and retaining more business.
For investors looking for a new financial advisor, the trend toward expansive teams is good news. For starters, larger teams have built-in redundancy that helps with succession in the event that advisors depart the practice. A team structure also creates a great training environment for younger, more diverse wealth managers—a wellspring of workers who will be sorely needed in the coming years.
As many of the advisors who built the nation’s best teams enter the late innings of their careers, an advisor shortage is brewing. A recent McKinsey study says the advisor workforce may be short 100,000 advisors by 2034.
How We Do It
The Top 1,200 is Barron’s largest advisor ranking, and it’s actually 51 individual rankings—one for each state plus Washington, D.C., with the number of advisors represented in each determined by its relative population and wealth. Advisors who wish to be considered for the ranking complete a 100-plus-question survey about their businesses, and this year’s ranking had more than 7,600 applicants, up 16% from last year.
Like all of Barron’s advisor rankings, this Top 1,200 list uses both quantitative and qualitative measures . Client assets managed by an advisor, along with the growth of those assets, are a good signifier of the general health of a practice. We also use advisors’ revenue numbers as a proxy for client satisfaction—clients vote on the way advisors are serving them with the fees they’re willing to pay. Last, we evaluate a range of qualitative elements, including regulatory records, advanced credentials and designations on a team, and the nature and structure of an advisor’s team.
We hope this year’s list will give investors a great starting point for finding the best advisor for their needs.
Corrections & Amplifications : Jack Taylor of Truist Investment Services is No. 6 in North Carolina in Barron’s 2025 Top 1,200 Financial Advisors ranking. The advisor originally listed in that spot was removed from the ranking. All the other advisors ranked in that state moved up one place, and R. Neil Stikeleather of Merrill Wealth Management was added to the list at No. 30. Read more about our ranking and see a link to the corrected list at barrons.com/AdvisorRanks .
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
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