DD Support Board and Research Team

[dukeb]

When I was taking college courses in entrepreneurship our professor would often invite successful small businesspeople to speak to the class. One of them had started a financial advisory firm but it was a struggle to get a foothold in the industry.

He re-branded the firm name to something like Rothschild and Mellon, Financial Advisors. He went to an estate sale and picked up some oil paintings of two distinguished/prosperous looking men, had them nicely framed and hung them in the office lobby with a nameplate on each...H.L. Rothschild and J.D. Mellon.

To my knowledge the firm itself was totally on the up and up and they never claimed that H.L. and J.D. were the firm's founders. People made assumptions when they saw those two names and, as the story goes, it did get potential clients in the door.

It is a common tactic for sleazy bucket shop brokers to adopt a name that the investing public associates with quality or other, better known, brokers.