Distributors Can Bank on Financial Business

"It's not the business it used to be," said Ray Hough, president of the Ray Hough Company, Muse, Pa., which has specialized in financial markets for the past 32 years. "We have been through three kinds of merger mania—in the late 1970s, the early 1990s and now—and the current wave is detrimental to the independent distributor," he said.