Some securities analysts are bearish about the near-term prospects for investments in Ameriprise Financial Inc.[@@]
American Express Company, New York, is in the process of converting Ameriprise – the old American Express Financial Advisors == into a stand-alone company by distributing Ameriprise shares to American Express shareholders.
Ameriprise, Minneapolis, will start out with a network of 10,000 "branded advisors." Many of those advisors have strong relationships with highly affluent clients. Some other Wall Street darlings go public without having much more than a fancy Web site.
Standard & Poor's, New York, says it will be adding Ameriprise to its flagship S&P 500 stock index. In theory, simply having a place in the index could make Ameriprise stock more attractive to some investors.
But Suneet Kamath, a life insurance analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company L.L.C., New York, notes in a report on Amerirpise that the company gets about 60% of its revenue from the sale of life insurance.
