Der Tag, an dem der „Trusted Advisor“ starb

On February 10, 2026, a strange thing happened to the boring, reliable world of wealth management stocks. While the broad market was flat, the titans of the industry, Charles Schwab, Raymond James, and LPL Financial, all violently shed between 8.4% and 8.8% of their value in a single session.

There was no scandal. No earnings miss. No regulatory crackdown.

Instead, a startup called Altruist laid a new card on the table: an AI feature named Hazel. And for the first time, Wall Street looked at the “Trusted Advisor” and saw a typewriter repairman in the age of the MacBook.

The News: The $100 Replacement

The catalyst was specific and technical. Altruist, a custodian platform for independent advisors, announced a new capability for its Hazel AI agent.

For decades, “tax planning” has been the high-ground defense for charging a 1% Asset Under Management (AUM) fee. Sure, a robo-advisor can rebalance a portfolio. But can a robot read your client’s jagged K-1 forms, analyze their ISO stock options, and simulate a multi-year Roth conversion strategy to minimize AMT liability?

Until February 10, 2026, the answer was no. That required a human CPA or a CFP (Certified Financial Planner) billing $300 an hour.

Hazel changed the math. The new feature ingests raw financial documents (1040s, paystubs, brokerage statements) and autonomously generates complex, multi-scenario tax strategies. It does this in minutes. It creates “what-if” models for home sales or bonuses instantly. And it does it for a flat software fee, effectively commoditizing the most intellectually expensive labor in the industry.

As Altruist CEO Jason Wenk put it: “It makes average advice a lot harder to justify.”

The Market Reaction: Panic Pricing

The market’s reaction was brutal because it was rational. Investors realized that the incumbent firms are priced based on the “stickiness” of their advisory fees. If the technical value of that advice drops to near-zero, the fee compression is inevitable.

• Charles Schwab: Down 8.8%.
• Raymond James: Down 8.5%.
• LPL Financial: Down 8.4%.
• St. James’s Place (UK): Down 13%.

This wasn’t a “tech sell-off.” It was a repricing of the human premium.

The Analysis: The Death of the Middle

For years, skeptics have warned that AI would come for the white-collar “knowledge worker.” Wealth management was supposed to be safe because it is a “relationship business.”

That is true, but only for the very top.

The Technical Gap: Why This Isn’t Just a Chatbot

Skeptics might argue that ChatGPT has been able to answer tax questions for years. This misses the architectural difference between a probabilistic LLM and a deterministic agent like Hazel.

Standard LLMs “hallucinate” math. They are text predictors, not calculators. Asking a base model to optimize a multi-year Roth conversion strategy often results in confident but mathematically ruinous errors.

Hazel is different because it uses a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture specifically tuned for IRS tax code sections. It doesn’t just “guess” the tax bracket; it ingests the specific line items from the uploaded 1040 form, cross-references them with the current year’s tax tables, and runs a deterministic simulation.

The “Trusted Advisor” relied on the friction of this data entry. It took hours to manually input data from a PDF tax return into planning software like MoneyGuidePro or eMoney. Hazel automates the ingestion, the analysis, and the output. The friction, and the billable hours attached to it, evaporated overnight.

The Economics of the 1% Fee

To understand the panic, one must look at the revenue model of the wealth management industry. The standard fee is 1% of Assets Under Management (AUM).

On a $1 million portfolio, the client pays $10,000 per year.

• Asset Allocation: Vanguard or Betterment does this for 0.25% or less. Value: $2,500.
• The “Gap”: The remaining $7,500 is justified by “holistic planning”, primarily tax efficiency and estate strategy.

If Hazel can execute that tax strategy for a flat software fee (CEO Jason Wenk suggests the agent performs work effectively for “$100 a month”), the margin collapse is mathematical. Clients will eventually demand that the efficiency savings be passed on to them. The 1% fee is a relic of an era where information was scarce and execution was manual.

History Rhymes: The Broker vs. The Interface

The industry has survived technology shifts before, but this one is different.

In the 1980s, stock brokers charged hundreds of dollars to execute a trade. Then E*TRADE and Charles Schwab made trading free (or close to it). The “stock broker” died, and the “financial advisor” was born, pivoting from selling access to selling advice.

Now, the advice itself is being digitized. The pivot this time is not to a new service, but to a new kind of relationship. The “Financial Therapist” model is robust because AI cannot (yet) simulate genuine empathy or hold a client’s hand during a divorce. But the vast majority of “advisors” are not therapists; they are spreadsheet operators. And the spreadsheet just woke up.

The Great Bifurcation

The drop in Raymond James and Schwab suggests the market believes the “Allocator” model is more prevalent than the “Therapist” model. And they are right. Most “financial advisors” are essentially relationship managers wrapped around a commodity product.

The industry is witnessing the Great Bifurcation of financial advice:

1. The Financial Therapist (Safe): This advisor manages the client, not the money. They talk you off the ledge when the market crashes. They meditate relationships between squabbling heirs. They are paid for trust.
2. The Allocator (Dead): This advisor creates asset allocation models and does tax harvesting. They are paid for technical execution.

Hazel just killed the Allocator. If a software agent can read a 1040 and optimize a tax strategy better than a human, the human cannot charge 1% of your net worth to do it.

When travel agents died in the late 1990s, the profession didn’t disappear. It just shrunk to a high-end luxury niche for complex trips, while Expedia took the rest.

Altruist just launched the Expedia of Tax Planning. And for the 15,000 advisors at LPL Financial, the writing is on the wall: become a therapist, or become obsolete.