Morgan Stanley Grows To Be Fayetteville?s Big Brokerage

With 20 registered brokers, Morgan Stanley became Fayetteville’s largest brokerage firm this year after a two-county consolidation by Merrill Lynch pulled that wire house out of the city. r

The size of Morgan Stanley’s Fayetteville staff has fluctuated over the years, but is once again on the rise.r

Morgan Stanley, which has more than 600 offices worldwide, opened its first Arkansas office in the 1950s in Hot Springs. The company opened an office in Fayetteville in 1987. In addition to those two offices, Morgan Stanley has five others in Arkansas — in Little Rock, Rogers, Texarkana, Fort Smith and Jonesboro. The Fayetteville office is the second largest in the state, next to the one in Little Rock.r

Morgan Stanley moved the Fayetteville office on July 1 from downtown to a 7,000-SF facility on Millsap Road. The branch also has as support staff of eight.r

Morgan Stanley has an additional 10 brokers in Rogers, eight in Fort Smith and two in Bella Vista.r

“We have tremendous resources as a global financial services firm,” said Jim Wood, vice president, branch manager in Fayetteville. “The other firms in this area, I don’t think they have the depth of research we have. We just have more resources behind us. Our library has more books. We can bring institutional quality money management to the retail investor.”r

Wood said his office has a certified financial analyst and another employee who is both a certified financial analyst and a certified financial planner.r

Wood declined to give financial information specifically pertaining to the Fayetteville office, saying “our business is confidential.”r

Worldwide, however, Morgan Stanley has $433 billion in assets under management, up from $420 billion last year. The current number is down from the pre-recession year of 2000 (when Morgan Stanley had $502 billion under management), but the number is once again on the upswing.r

According to the company’s Web site, Morgan Stanley has a shareholder return of 156.9 percent since the merger with Dean Witter in 1997. That compares to a return of 30.1 percent for the Standard & Poors 500 during the same time period.r

Morgan Stanley had net income of $2.98 billion in fiscal 2002. That’s down from $3.5 billion the previous year and $5.5 billion in pre-recession 2000.r

Morgan Stanley had a return on equity of 14 percent in 2002, down from 19 percent a year earlier and a peak of 33 percent in 1999 but “significantly better than almost all our competitors,” the company said in its 2002 annual report. r

In 1997, Morgan Stanley, which was established in New York in 1935, merged with Dean Witter, founded in 1924 in San Francisco. r

Morgan Stanley now has more than 52,000 employees in 600 offices in 28 countries.