What exactly is a wealth management platform?
It's a tech buzzword. OK I'm being a bit glib.  A Wealth Management Platform is a software system designed to help people track their investment portfolios and research new investments.  Sometimes, trusts and small investment firms will use these platforms as well but they will often have more specialized separate systems for portfolio tracking and research. There is a large variety of platforms out there all trying to be the best platform for you... or someone else.  Some will have websites and be open to all with money and some will be applications and only target some types of investors.  Some will have robo-advising (Wealthfront), a human adviser (Merrill) or have none at all.  Some will have nice graphical tools to track your portfolio or great research tools or both (I try not to recommend products on this site).  Some can be designed to nudge you into their ideology (Vanguard). All, though, have a technology team behind them to make investing easier for you (or their investment advisers) or to sell you their products.  You get the picture. Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service.
I understand the concepts behind the different weighting methods, but what I’m wondering is why a company CHOOSES a specific weighting method. For example, what exactly was being looked at when the decision was made to make the DJIA price-weighted instead of market cap-weighted? Why does a manager decide to use free-floating methodology over price-weighting? I just don’t understand why there’s no uniformity.  Apologies as I may have not worded my question properly. "What is your biggest wealth building tool?  Income.  If you ""nerf"" your income with payments to banks, cable, credit card debt, car payments, and lattes then you are naturally handicapping your wealth building.  It is sort of like trying to drive home a nail holding a hammer right underneath the head.   Normal is broke, don't be normal. Normal obtains student loans while getting an education.  You don't have to.  You can work part time, or even full time and get a degree. As an example, here is one way to do it in Florida.  Get a job working fast food and get your associates degree using a community college that are cheap.  Then apply for the state troopers.  Go away for about 5 months, earning an income the whole time.  You automatically graduate with a job that pays for state schools.  Take the next three years (or more if you want an advanced degree) to get your bachelors.  Then start your desirable career. What is better to have ""wasted"" approx 1.5 years being a state trooper, or to have a student loan payment for 20 years?  There is not even pressure to obtain employment right after graduation.  BTW, I know someone who is doing exactly what I outlined. Every commercial you watch is geared toward getting you to sign on the line that is dotted, often going into debt to do so.  Car commercials will tell you that you are a bad mom or not a real man if you don't drive the 2015 whatever.   Think differently, throw out your numbers and shoot for zero debt. EDIT:  OP, I have a MS in Comp Sci, and started one in finance.  My wife also has a masters.  We had debt.  We paid that crap off.  Work like a fiend and do the same.  My wife's was significant.  She planned on having her employer pay it off for each year she worked there.  (Like 20% each year or something.)  Guess what, that did not work out!  She went to work somewhere else!  Live like you are still in college and use all that extra money to get rid of your debt.  Student loans are consumer debt." "&gt; Yes, you lied for 3 years  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.  Except in this case ""stupidity"" can be replaced with ""a really difficult problem"". That problem is counting.  I work on a web service that counts 30 day active users in the 100s of millions. At this scale counting unique users becomes VERY difficult. Mistakes happen... constantly. We have discovered 3 times in my 3 years in this team that users were being miscounted... by a LOT. It happens, the systems underlying all of our users across multiple platforms are a product of ageing software, unfit for their current task. There isn't enough commitment from management to allocate sufficient resources to actually fix the problem. Defining an active user sometimes isn't even obvious. Accounting for users across multiple platforms and multiple accounts while simultaneously adhering to certain legal and privacy agreements all quickly lead to a difficult task from something that seems simple to someone who has never tried to count at this scale.  Now I'm adding this context with a big asterisk:   \* If it's the primary number that you announce at each earnings call... then you'd better get the fucking count right." Think again.    **All prosperity** ultimately comes from the generation -the *creation*- of wealth.    We create wealth out of the ether when we take a thing -a physical item- which is worth little and turn it into a thing that is worth more with the power of an idea and the application of labor.  On a macro scale, that translates into the manufacturing sector.  The manufacturing sector in the US has *changed*, it's not gone.  It's spectacularly healthy in a plethroa of new ways, while all the old ones have died off or are dying a slow death.  The new manufacturing sector demands skill, not just attendance.  *Unskilled* work is drying up, because under current laws unskilled people cost more to employ than they can possibly produce, but someone with a skill in trade can get a job in half a heartbeat, especially if they are willing to move to where the job is.  No nation of any size can prosper without the internal generation of real wealth.  The idea that we can be a nation of bankers and managers is laughable and is precisely what got us into our current situation.  The future is and *will always be* in making new things.  Labor is not a derogative word and it does *not* equate to a second-class existence, as pay rates are currently demonstrating.  It was geniuses working in the trades who were the innovators and entrepreneurs that built American industrial power (thus, economic power) in the first place.    It will be again. "I'm posting this because I think I can do a better job of explaining and detailing everything from start to stop. :) A ""broker"" is just someone who connect buyers and sellers - a middleman of sorts who is easy to deal with. There are many kinds of brokers; the ones you'll most commonly hear about these days are ""mortgage broker"" (for arranging home loans) and ""stockbroker"". The stockbroker helps you buy and sell stock. The stockbroker has a connection to one or more stock exchanges (e.g. Nasdaq, NYSE) and will submit your orders to them in order to fulfill it. This way Nasdaq and NYSE don't have to be in the business of managing millions of customer accounts (and submitting tax information about those accounts to the government and what-not) - they just manage relationships with brokerages, which is much easier for them. To invest in a stock, you will need to: In this day and age, most brokers that you care about will be easily accessed via the Internet, the applications will be available on the Internet, and the trading interface will be over the Internet. There may also be paper and/or telephone interfaces to the brokerage, but the Internet interface will work better. Be aware that post-IPO social media stock is risky; don't invest any money if you're not prepared for the possibility of losing every penny of it. Also, don't forget that a variety of alternative things exist that you can buy from a broker, such as an S&P 500 index fund or exchange-traded corporate bond fund; these will earn you some reward over time with significantly less risk. If you do not already have similar holdings through a retirement plan, you should consider purchasing some of these sooner or later." I interned at a wealth management firm that used very active momentum trading, 99% technicals. Strictly ETFs (indexes, currencies, commodities, etc), no individual equities. They'd hold anywhere from 1-4 weeks, then dump it as soon as the chart starts turning over.  As soon as I get enough capital I'm adopting their same exact strategy, it's painfully easy "I've just recently launched an open source wealth management platform - wealthbot.io ...  ""Webo"" is mostly targeted at RIA's to help the manage multiple portfolios, etc. Take a look at the demo at demo.wealthbot.io, you'll also find links to github, etc. there. It's a rather involved project, but if you are looking for use cases of rebalancing, portfolio accounting, custodian integration, tax loss harvesting, and many other features available at some of the popular robo-advisors, you might find it interesting." "Asset management typically refers to the ""product""  group e.g. Mutual fund, etf, etc., like invesco offering qqq or some emerging market mutual fund.  Capital management is more vague and can refer to a wide range of financial products and services including asset management and stuff like ptfl planning, wealth advisory etc.  That said they are both used interchangeably and not like anyone would correct you if you used one vs the other..."