Is PWM and PB mainly just bringing in money?
I had a PWM internship at a top bank and it seems as if there is little to no finance involved. The advisor really only research which investment managers to use. Is this how it is in all PB and PWM?
What wealth levels does your advisor serve?
Short answer is PWM is a sales/relationship business, so at every level bringing in money is a key skill that will be rewarded and perhaps outshines all others.
But, as you go up market into HNW/UHNW, the products themselves and the teams supporting them become more and more sophisticated. A family with $5MM probably gets all the advice they need with a shortlist of investment managers and a chat about risk tolerance. A family with $500MM needs sophisticated asset allocation guidance, legal/trust advisory, tax planning, potentially multiple credit facilities, etc. That's where you can start to leverage real finance skills into career value-add.
You forgot the second, more important part: Keeping it.
Unless you are dealing with very high net worth clients, most of it is BSing the client and then CFP type risk analysis, tax planning, insurance planning, estate planning etc. You are going to be miles from actual cutting edge financial analysis and development. My 'advice' time as a financial advisor mostly involved "This is what a stock is, this is a bond is, stock riskier than bond. It may make you more money tho. How much of each u want?" Once I got to talk about IDGRAT strategies, but that was a real streak of luck with an internal FI PM working on liquidity concerns for a Fortune 50 company.
From what I've seen manager research is the only part that can produce alpha, so at least that's something interesting. Everything else is tax/legal/estate and mostly hand-holding, so professional expertise and sales, respectively.
The money is made by the sales guys. From my experience, even the big sophisticated shops don't have rigorous, endowment-type manager research.
Goldman PW is the best I've seen. JPM might be good too, I say that because we haven't cracked them.
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