Raymond James Financial, the US-based financial advisory group, could be poised to make a "meaningful acquisition," to exploit the current financial turmoil, said Chet Helck, the company’s president and chief operating officer, according to Investment News.

However, due to the seize-up in the credit market and the trouble raising cash through a stock sale, financing a deal for a broker-dealer or asset manager right now could be difficult, Mr Helck said.

"We’d like to grow the asset management business," Mr Helck said.

For the nine-month period ended in June, asset management at the firm accounted for 7.5 per cent of revenue, which totaled close to $2.4 billion.

Raymond James, headquartered in St Petersburg, Florida, which has 4,900 representatives and advisors in the US and internationally across various business channels, has shied away from big deals since the start of the decade, Mr Helck said. He made his comment in New York before the annual meeting of the New York- and Washington-based Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, of which he is a member of the board.

"The problem recently has been valuations," Mr Helck said. "The numbers make no sense," he said. "We’re not going to pay a price that’s not sensible." Yet the market for broker-dealers is intensifying, Mr Helck said.

"We’re seeing a lot more today, people who want to sell broker-dealers," he said.

Firms on the block range from the very small to some of the biggest in the business, such as those broker-dealers in the AIG Advisor Group of New York, Mr Helck said, adding that those firms are part of a "bigger package" of companies.

He declined to mention specific firms that Raymond James has looked to acquire, but he said that placing a value on broker-dealers takes into consideration a variety of factors. Those include revenue and earnings, as well as culture and the payout grid that the firm has in place for its representatives and advisors.

Meanwhile, a veteran US brokerage team at Merrill Lynch that produces $2.7 million in fees and commissions recently left to join Raymond James, saying its clients are concerned about the financial stability of Merrill, even though the Wall Street bank has been reportedly offering stay bonuses of up to $1 million to brokers.

Charles Nemes, who has worked at Merrill for 21 years, Tim Rush, a 19-year Merrill veteran, and three associates plan to open a new Raymond James office in Michigan in two weeks. The group oversees about $520 million of assets for about 250 clients, Mr Nemes was quoted as saying, and generated more than $3.75 million of annual revenue for Merrill.

Mr Nemes said Merrill’s financial woes were a direct cause of his group’s decision to leave.

“Some clients who’ve been with us for a number of years were asking if their assets were safe,” he said, referring to five consecutive quarters in which New York-based Merrill accumulated $23.8 billion in losses. “As one client put it, 'How can we feel comfortable that our money is being managed responsibly when the firm we’re putting the money with can’t manage its own finances?' They shouldn’t have to go through that kind of stress.”

Merrill, the world’s biggest brokerage firm with more than 16,000 financial advisors, said in September it would sell itself to Bank of America to strengthen a balance sheet hobbled by billions of dollars of bad mortgage-related assets.

A Merrill spokeswoman declined to comment on the brokers' departure.

Meanwhile, a team of Merrill brokers in Westport, Connecticut, with about $900 million of client assets confirmed they have broken off and set up an independent advisory firm, LLBH Group Private Wealth Management, named for its principals William Lomus, William Loftus, Kevin Burns and Jim Pratt-Heaney.

Some Merrill brokers are concerned that their firm will be constrained from offering deals that are too fat at a time when its shareholders are hurting and when Bank of America has decided to accept a $25 billion investment from the US government to shore up its balance sheet.

Mr Nemes, who said he was in Merrill’s top broker recognition club for about 15 years, began looking for a new home last February as the extent of Merrill’s losses were becoming evident.

Raymond James is paying the team a small upfront bonus, but the team’s chief motivation for picking the firm was its record of conservative management that has allowed the Florida-based firm to avoid the subprime-mortgage and credit disasters that have wounded so many financial firms, Mr Nemes said.

Raymond James also opened a new stand-alone office for the Michigan brokers just half a mile from their old Merrill haunts.

“We are not going because of the paycheck,’’ Mr Nemes said, noting that they received “less than half of what we could have gotten somewhere else.”

He said he’s been hearing from many Merrill brokers who are considering exits. “That place is very sullen right now,’’ he said.