Brokerage veteran J. Wetherbee targets $1 billion in assets in three years. Weatherbee Wealth Management, a new non-clearing securities firm in Albany, N.Y., hopes to attract area wirehouse brokers who may be feeling disillusioned by a financial crisis that has roiled Wall Street and resulted in bankruptcy, mega-mergers and layoffs.

Average producers

The firm aims to support about a dozen registered representatives and have about $1 billion under management by 2012. That would give brokers at the firm average assets under management of about $83.3 million. The 2007 wirehouse average was about $70 million per rep.

Wetherbee Wealth Management will clear trades through Albany-based C.L. King & Associates.

Weatherbee Wealth Management is run by Jeffrey Wetherbee, a veteran branch manager for UBS (via Paine Webber), Prudential Securities (now Wachovia Securities) and E.F. Hutton (now part of Citigroup's Smith Barney).

Wetherbee was most recently managing director of the NYS Small Business Technology Investment Fund, a New York State-owned venture-capital conduit with a portfolio of about 40 early-stage companies valued at around $30 million. In the 1970s, he owned, operated and eventually sold a plastics manufacturing company. -FWR

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