Stifel Financial Corp SF

The business

Stifel is two firms sharing a balance sheet. The larger is a wealth manager: brokers and advisors overseeing a record $580.1B of client assets, earning fees, commissions and the interest spread on client cash, a business that produced $361.8M of pre-tax profit last quarter at a 48.2% comp ratio. The smaller is a full institutional bank, equities and fixed income research, underwriting, advisory, that swings with the cycle and produced $92.2M. The moat is the advisor network, two decades of acquisitions rolled into a platform that keeps recruiting because the economics work for the brokers, and asset gathering that compounds regardless of deal flow.