POOR TEXAN, RICH CLIENTELE: NATIONAL PUBLICATIONS CITE STEPHEN THOMAS' FIRM AS A TOP PERFORMER, HELPING THE CHARLOTTE MONEY MANAGER STAND OUT IN A CROWDED INDUSTRY.

AuthorDykes, David
PositionNC TREND: Money talk: North Carolina's financial set

Charlotte money manager Stephen Thomas gets a lot of national recognition, maybe as much as anyone in his industry in North Carolina. With $1.3 billion under management and 19 employees, he made Barron's list of the 100 top independent financial advisers this year, ranking 98th. No one else from the Carolinas was ranked by the financial newspaper. The Financial Times has also included his firm, Linden Thomas & Co., in its ratings of 400 top financial advisers for the last two years.

Linden Thomas (Linden is his middle name) has 600 clients with typical net worths of $7 million and an average account of $3 million. Portfolios range up to $30 million.

It's quite a success story for Thomas, who tried a couple of other careers before settling on finance. "It's a blessing to be recognized. But at the end of the day, I'm still the poor kid from Texas, and I want clients to do real well," he says.

Thomas, 56, studied architecture at Texas A&M University but found the work boring as an intern back in his hometown of Dallas. "I thought I wanted to design skyscrapers for a living and thought I was going to be a great architect," he says. "It was just a very disappointing job, because I just sat there drawing I-beams for the other senior architects."

He later worked at and owned a couple of restaurants. Thomas' roommate at the time was a bond trader who urged him to find a finance job. Dallas firms weren't hiring, so Thomas followed a lead to Washington, D.C. A branch manager at the EF Hutton brokerage offered him a position, which he accepted with a caveat: He didn't have the money to return to Dallas and collect his belongings. The manager lent him $200, setting him up for a long investment career.

Over 20 years, Thomas would work for Prudential Securities, Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. After Hutton operations merged with Smith Barney, Thomas stayed on but moved to Charlotte. He started his own company in 2005, convinced he could achieve better results and customer service. A significant part of the revenue of large brokerage firms goes to back-office...

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