Wirehouse Moves This Week: J.P. Morgan's $18.6B Latigo Peak Exit Leads as UBS Loses a Las Vegas Team

J.P. Morgan's $18.6 billion Latigo Peak breakaway led a week that also saw UBS lose a Las Vegas team and add two New Jersey advisors.

The largest wirehouse departure of 2026 by reported assets landed this week, and it came from J.P. Morgan rather than from the firms that usually dominate the attrition tallies. Counting only moves that were registered or took effect between Oct. 15 and Oct. 22, we found four: two breakaway teams and two individual hires. UBS appears on both sides of that list, losing a Las Vegas team while adding two advisors in New Jersey, and Merrill and Morgan Stanley produced little in the way of verifiable team moves over the period.

J.P. Morgan Advisors lost Phil Scott and Jim Atwood, two former First Republic practices that now operate as Latigo Peak Partners, a self-funded registered investment adviser. The firm says it starts with about $18.6 billion in client assets and more than $130 million in annual revenue. Their J.P. Morgan Securities registrations ended Oct. 18, according to BrokerCheck, and Latigo Peak Partners LLC now appears in the SEC adviser database. Scott's FINRA file carries his legal name, Walter Phillip Schlaepfer. Both advisors had come to J.P. Morgan through the 2023 takeover of First Republic, not through recruiting. WirehouseHUB covered the launch in detail on Oct. 19.

UBS had the week's other team exit. In Las Vegas, Russell Price and Salvatore "Sam" Mineo, whose team ran as MPI Wealth Management at UBS, now operate as Truing Capital Advisors with roughly $750 million in assets under supervision, according to WealthManagement.com, which reported on Oct. 20 that Elevation Point, the minority investor founded by former Sanctuary Wealth chief Jim Dickson, has taken a stake in the firm. Custody will sit with Goldman Sachs Custody Solutions, the outlet said. The SEC adviser database already lists Truing Capital Advisors as a business name of Elevation Point Wealth Partners LLC, but as of Oct. 22 BrokerCheck still showed both Price and Mineo registered with UBS in Las Vegas, so the paperwork side of the transition appears unfinished.

UBS did book additions. Its own recruiting announcements show Francis Ahmed joining the Florham Park, N.J., office on Oct. 15 from J.P. Morgan Private Bank, where UBS says she worked with ultra-wealthy clients around Summit, N.J., and Melissa Valenzuela joining the Paramus office the same day. BrokerCheck shows Valenzuela coming directly from Merrill, where she had been registered since 2023, and Ahmed from J.P. Morgan Securities, where she had been since 2020. UBS did not disclose assets for either hire. Neither is a team move of the scale UBS has lost this year, which has included the Cullman/Holt group to a Wells Fargo FiNet practice and the Strong family practice to Wells Fargo's employee channel.

Several moves announced during the week fell outside our window because the registrations themselves were older, and we have left them out of this recap. For Merrill and Morgan Stanley, we found no team move inside the window that could be confirmed through a primary source or a second outlet, beyond Valenzuela's individual move from Merrill to UBS. That is a reporting gap, not proof of a quiet week: registration changes often surface days after the fact, and some outlets report moves we do not use as sources.

A note on our own data. WirehouseHUB's registration scorecard currently runs through Oct. 8, so it does not yet cover this week. Every move above was checked against BrokerCheck, the SEC adviser database or firm announcements, and asset figures are those stated by the firms or by the outlet named in each paragraph.