Articles

There’s No Business Like the Brokerage Business


This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on November 1st, 2012.

If regulators and brokerage firms are serious about restoring public confidence in the markets, they will have to do better than they did in the pathetic case of Mark C. Hotton.

Hotton is the 46-year-old former stockbroker who allegedly duped the producers of the Broadway musical “Rebecca” into believing he had lined up $4.5 million in financing. According to law enforcement officials, he even concocted a fictitious Australian guy, Paul Abrams, who would have been good for $2 million if only he hadn’t keeled over from malaria when it was time to write his check. While the clueless backers fell for his stories, Hotton pocketed finder’s fees. “Rebecca” has been “postponed indefinitely,” according to the show’s website.

It’s distressing, but it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise from a man whose brokerage industry records since 1993 reveal a stolen-property charge, 16 customer disputes, a firing, a lien and a bankruptcy.

The real disgrace here isn’t Hotton, who is being held without bail after his arrest on two counts of fraud last month. The bigger scandal is trumped-up claims like this one:

“Ultimately, Hotton’s imagination was no match for the FBI, which uncovered, with lightning speed, his alleged financial misdeeds,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in an Oct. 15 press release.

Lightning speed? Now that is what I would call a real whopper.

First Queries

I first began to contact Hotton’s lawyers a year ago this month when I saw that Hotton continued to work as a broker after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, but they weren’t very talkative. Michael S. Finkelstein, a lawyer on Long Island, told me to call him back at 4 p.m. on Nov. 22, but didn’t answer that day, and never responded to voicemails. Similarly, voicemails and e-mails that I left with three other Hotton lawyers since Oct. 8 after the “Rebecca” flap erupted have gone unanswered. I couldn’t reach Hotton for comment.

Hotton has faced allegations of financial misdeeds as far back as 1990, yet moved on to work at six brokerage firms, including Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co. and Oppenheimer & Co. He was accused of fraud in multimillion-dollar lawsuits filed before anyone involved in “Rebecca” had ever heard of him. But there was nothing speedy about law enforcement’s response until the victims were attention-grabbing show-business types.

Hotton got a modest $60,000 from the producers of “Rebecca,” according to the U.S. attorney, and I suppose the crack investigators at the Federal Bureau of Investigation deserve credit for getting to the bottom of one of his punier swindles.

Anyone truly interested in watching out for the public might have started paying attention after Hotton bounced a check for $31,550 to Vilsmeier Auction Co. in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, on April 25, 1990. Hotton took possession of a 1985 Ford van and three other vehicles, thanks partly to a forged letter from a Westminster Bank officer assuring that his account had sufficient funds. Four months later, the real manager at the bank said in an affidavit that the letter was bogus and signed by a person who didn’t exist.

People who bounce checks and forge documents don’t belong in the securities business, but Hotton, who pleaded not guilty to two fraud counts last month, managed to get a broker’s license three years later anyway.

I asked Michelle Ong, a spokeswoman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, how a broker like Hotton could stay in the business as long as he had. She said that before 2009, the complaints against Hotton had either been denied by his employers, or “settled for little money.” She says Finra began to investigate Hotton in 2009. That’s nice, I suppose, but three years later, Finra still has not announced any sanctions.

Finra Knew

Ong said that Finra knew Hotton had been convicted of criminal possession of stolen property, which apparently isn’t enough to convince regulators that a broker shouldn’t be in charge of other people’s money.

In the securities business, there is this brilliant idea that firms have a self-interest in tossing out bad guys. So I checked in with two firms that employed Hotton. I sent a list of 11 questions about Hotton’s criminal record and customer complaints to Paul Caminiti, a spokesman for Ladenburg, and all he had to say was that Hotton left the firm in 2005 to join Oppenheimer.

It gets worse.

On Oct. 15, the day Hotton was arrested, I called Noah Sorkin, a securities lawyer who worked at Oppenheimer when Hotton was there. Today, Sorkin is general counsel in New York at AIG Advisor Group, a network of independent brokers. “Lemme do this if it’s OK with you,” he said when I began to ask about Hotton. Sorkin said he would be happy to chat with me, but would first have to talk with lawyers at Oppenheimer. I’m still waiting for that call back.

An Oppenheimer spokesman, Brian Maddox, said this: “Investigations were conducted by both Oppenheimer and a securities regulator and no evidence of misconduct was uncovered. Any claims involving Mr. Hotton’s activities came to Oppenheimer’s attention after he left Oppenheimer.” He added that Oppenheimer employees who hired Hotton are no longer with the firm.

That probably would come as a surprise to Philip R. Schatz, a lawyer who filed an affirmation on June 25, 2010, in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Hotton while he was working at Oppenheimer, which wasn’t named as a defendant. Schatz said that, in previous lawsuits he had been involved with, Hotton’s actions at Oppenheimer and Ladenburg left him with serious reservations about the broker. In fact, he wrote that he had urged Sorkin in 2006 to investigate Hotton. “I told Mr. Sorkin that if I were in his position, as a matter of prudence, I would conduct a thorough review” of Hotton’s history, he wrote.

Yet for almost three more years, Hotton worked at Oppenheimer before moving to another firm. His story is but the latest example of the joke that securities regulation has become.

Memo to former employees: Don’t mess with Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs’ most famous opinion writer did what no Goldman employee is supposed to do: He talked, very publicly, about his experience at the firm.

Greg Smith’s March 14 New York Times op-ed “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” generated 3 million page views within 24 hours. The issues he brought up about how business is done at Goldman hit a chord with the public.

Now he’s written a book “Why I Left Goldman Sachs.” I reviewed it for Bloomberg today, and you can read the review here.

I have criticisms of “Why I Left.” Smith walks us through his 12 years at Goldman but doesn’t reflect on the fact that he himself was seduced by the firm and its much hyped culture of integrity and “customer first.”

And he doesn’t look at the current problems of Goldman and its competitors with a sense of history. Fraud, scandals, and conflicts of interest on Wall Street should be addressed, as Smith says, but they are nothing new. “Why I Left,” though, is mostly limited to the dozen years Smith was at the company and the “toxic” culture he observed at the end. I wonder if he understood that Goldman may not have been all it was cracked up to be in the first place.

That said, he’s getting creamed with criticisms I don’t think he deserves. The book was all hype and didn’t disclose anything illegal, goes one argument. Well, the author said “I don’t know of any illegal behavior” in that op-ed seven months ago, so why did his critics expect otherwise? My favorite Greg Smith bash is the argument that goes something like this: “He asked Goldman for a million-dollar bonus that he didn’t deserve.” Are we really supposed to be shocked at the notion of someone on Wall Street wanting to get paid more than they deserve?

Considering Smith’s out of work, maybe Goldman will consider him for its next FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, which gives five-figure payments to authors who sometimes even write about brokerage firms. Talk about a conflict of interest.

Goldman’s counterattack has been over-the-top. The firm shared excerpts from Smith’s self-evaluations with Bloomberg, as well as documents that showed he was denied a raise and a promotion.

Did you know that your bosses could hand out information from your HR files if you tick them off? I’ll bet that looming threat is adding a whole new understanding of the firm’s culture of “collaboration, teamwork and integrity” with the troops at Goldman.

The book could have been better. The issues Smith raised are important even if they are age-old Wall Street problems. And the message from Smith’s former employer is loud and clear: Don’t mess with Goldman Sachs.

How To Get Women on Corporate Boards: Friendly Persuasion Didn’t Work, But Quotas Would

If you really want to get a bunch of business types going, mention the q-word.

That would be quotas. The only strategy that’s made much of a difference in the long fight to get women on corporate boards of directors.

There are well-intentioned efforts from New York to London to cajole and embarrass company boards into recruiting women. Helena Morrissey, the CEO of London’s Newton Investment Management, founded the “30 Percent Club” with the goal of filling 30 percent of UK board seats with women by 2015. Joe Keefe, president of Pax World, the socially responsible investors, spearheaded a push in June to send letters to the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 — there were 41 of them — who had no women on their boards.

Four months later, Keefe’s received 14 responses.

You hear a lot of talk about how we just need to get women into the pipeline and the problem will fix itself. Consider a few statistics on that. The number of women earning undergraduate business degrees reached 108,285 in 1985, up tenfold from 1971. By 2002, women surpassed men for the first time with 139,874 business degrees earned.

Yes, I know. Women may have the pedigrees, but they are just so busy abandoning their careers and having babies — what’s a corporation to do? Take some time to read the work done by the New York-based research group Catalyst Inc., which started tracking 4,100 full-time MBA graduates in 2007 to see how similarly situated male and female MBAs would do in the real world. Men started out making $4,600 more than women in their first post-graduation jobs. Even when Catalyst focused only on men and women who aspired to be senior officers, or when they looked only at men and women who had no children, they found men advancing faster and earning more.

In other words, there’s more to the problem than inferior education or time-outs for maternity leaves. Some of us call it gender discrimination.

Viviane Reding, the European Union Justice Commission, is calling for mandatory quotas of women on corporate boards. My guess is she’s right that it’s time to conclude that cajoling and pleas for self-regulation are a waste of time. I write about the flap over quotas in my column for Quartz.com today. Read article.

Let me know your thoughts on this issue. You can email me at susan.antilla15@gmail.com or send me a note @antillaview.

‘Dumb Money’ Is Staring Most of Us in the Face


This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on October 4th, 2012.

Financial pros have a long history of sneering at mom and pop investors as “the dumb money,” all the while cashing in on commissions each time a sucker sells at the bottom or buys at the top.

Now the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has made it official: The investing public doesn’t know what it is doing.

It took an act of Congress and 182 pages for the SEC in August to publish its “Study Regarding Financial Literacy Among Investors,” an exercise mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The study’s grim statistics showed that about half the investing public can’t read a stock trade confirmation and two-thirds can’t figure out how much their adviser would pocket on the sale of mutual-fund shares. After being shown documents for an account in which a customer’s broker used an outside custodial firm to hold the securities and issue the account statements, only a quarter could identify the custodian. There is more where that came from, but you get the idea.

Consider the profile of the 4,800 investors surveyed for the report, which concluded that they “lack basic financial literacy.” More than half had full-time jobs, 11 percent had part-time jobs, 70 percent had at least a two-year college degree and 63 percent had annual income of more than $50,000. We’re not talking about Mitt Romney’s indolent moochers here. The dumb money could be your neighbor. Or you.

Getting Taken

Of course, there’s ample evidence by now that you didn’t have to be Uncle Charlie in the nursing home to wind up parking your money with Bernard Madoff, or to sign up for designed-to-fail collateralized-debt obligations from Goldman Sachs. Smart money can be clueless, too.

For the moment though, let’s stick with investors who don’t work on Wall Street and don’t have an inkling that the worthwhile initial public offering is the one they will never be able to buy. So we have this new information about the public’s failure to understand finance. What do we do with it?

The report has been a jumping-off point for a lot of feel-good proposals that, sadly, are dead on arrival. The SEC says it got “many comment letters” advocating a “comprehensive financial literacy program in the United States that starts in elementary school.” Hey, a new education program sounds great. But try that one out on your strapped local school principal.

And maybe ask those principals how just plain old, non-financial literacy is working out. On Sept. 24, the College Board said reading scores on the SAT were the lowest in four decades. How do you teach people to read prospectuses when they have trouble reading at all?

The weird thing about the SEC’s comprehensive look at the failings of U.S. investors is that the effort comes even as a new law is about to unleash a flood of fresh hazards on the public. On April 5, President Barack Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, a stunning piece of deregulation that will relax disclosure rules for some public companies and allow Internet stock offerings through what is known as crowd-funding.

So even as we learn that investors need more education about basics, we set them up as prey for a whole new genre of rip-offs.

There are some solutions here, and the quickest fixes are the ones that make investors smarter about fraud, not about computation of mutual fund fees:

Brokerages should be required to give customers a copy of an adviser’s regulatory record before they can open an account. Along with that, firms should reveal the number of times a broker has had a case expunged from his or her record (I’d look for a new broker if that number was more than one) and send a recap of every bankruptcy filing, every sanction by a professional organization and every lawsuit filed against the broker in state or federal court.

Head Scratching

I was heartened to see that 37 percent of the investors in the SEC study said they actually checked a broker’s records, but it was a head-scratcher that 21 percent didn’t consider “allegations or findings of serious misconduct” to be important. Get these facts under customers’ noses and make it hard for them to avoid considering them.

Firms also should explain in writing the terms of the relationship to new customers. I don’t mean boilerplate disclosures about the odious policy of mandatory arbitration that lets firms avoid court. There should be a statement in plain English saying what the firm promises. “Dear Mrs. Smith: We may say in our glossy ads that you are a valued customer, but we don’t have to put your interest before ours, and if you want to sue us, you will have to prove that we sold you something that wasn’t suitable, which is a lot harder than proving we weren’t working in your best interest.” OK, so the wording could be more delicate, but either way investors should get the broker’s commitment in writing.

Lazy investors (like the one who told the SEC, “If you can’t put it on a 4 x 5 card, I don’t want to deal with it”) should at least take smart shortcuts: First, go through the indecipherable documents your broker sent you and read the footnotes, which will at the very least arm you with material for your next cocktail party. After that, look for these words or terms: “certain proceedings,” “conflict of interest,” “fraud,” “Wells notice,” “litigation,” “Securities and Exchange Commission,” “cease and desist” and “not FDIC.” You will find all of them in the sections the smart money hopes you never read.

‘Dumb Money’ Is Staring Most of Us in the Face

Americans are pretty much illiterate when it comes to finance. They don’t know how to read a stock trade confirmation and have problems figuring out how much commission they’re paying their brokers on a mutual fund sale.

For years, professionals on Wall Street have sneered at the public as “the dumb money.” Well, they may not be geniuses on Wall Street, either. But they’re right that retail investors could use some serious coaching.

A recent report by the Securities and Exchange Commission mapped out in 182 painful pages how little the public understands about finance (which suits some people on Wall Street just fine, by the way). I talk about the grim details in my latest Bloomberg View column:

 “Consider the profile of the 4,800 investors surveyed for the report, which concluded that they “lack basic financial literacy.” More than half had full-time jobs, 11 percent had part-time jobs, 70 percent had at least a two-year college degree and 63 percent had annual income of more than $50,000. We’re not talking about Mitt Romney’s indolent moochers here. The dumb money could be your neighbor. Or you.”

The results have inspired calls for financial literacy programs starting even in elementary school, but let’s get real. From the looks of things, school administrators don’t even have the resources for plain-vanilla literacy programs, let alone special classes in personal investing.

An alternative to new programs: At least get the public smarter about avoiding fraud. I have some ideas about that that you can read here.

Looking for success in biz? Change your name from ‘Jennifer’ to ‘John’

In the academic world, if your name is John, you’re more likely to be well-thought-of than you would be if your name were Jennifer. When science professors were asked to evaluate the same one-page summary of a promising, but not stellar job applicant, they gave higher scores to the potential applicant whose name was “John” than they did to “Jennifer.”

They estimated that the “Johns” ought to be making more money, too. And they were more likely to be willing to mentor “John.”

The New York Times tonight published a story about new work by researchers at Yale University that adds to the evidence that people making evaluations about the talent and worth of job applicants think more highly of candidates who are men. Even when the men are armed with identical qualifications described in precisely the same words. And even when its a woman making the evaluation.

Combine these findings with the story of “James Chartrand,” a female website developer who ditched her identity and began pitching her newly named company — “Men With Pens” — as an operation run by a guy. Business picked up. Online negotiating became easy.

And then there is the famous study about hiring practices by symphony orchestras. Hide a female musician behind a screen during an audition, and she is more likely to be hired. Here’s a link to that study. Read article.

In a column for CNN.com last week, I talked about the lopsided bylines that readers are exposed to when they read articles in newspapers or online. Women write only 20 percent of newspaper op-eds, yet they’ve received between 70 and 76 percent of all the journalism and mass communications degrees earned over the past ten years. If you have a daughter who isn’t in the workforce yet, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let her know what she has ahead of her. The fight for gender equality is not finished. It’s barely begun.

What’s the Deal with Women in Journalism?

Reading an op-ed in a major newspaper? Chances are eight in ten it’s written by a man. In fact, 60 percent of newspaper employees are men and almost 70 percent of the commentaries you read on major websites are written by men.

In my latest column for CNN.com, I take a look at what’s happened in journalism since the groundbreaking gender discrimination lawsuit by women at Newsweek 42 years ago.

In her just-published book “The Good Girls Revolt,” Lynn Povich, a 47-year journalism veteran who started as a secretary in the Paris bureau of Newsweek magazine in 1965, tells how 46 women with degrees from top schools fought back after being relegated to jobs checking facts and clipping newspaper stories while men with similar credentials got the bylines and big salaries.

Today’s statistics sound out-of-line when you consider that over the past 10 years, between 70 and 76% of all journalism and mass communications graduates have been women.

Let me know what you think about who’s shaping most of the coverage you’re reading. Read article.

Vetting a Stock Broker? Pay Attention to Who’s Supplying the Records

Investors are spending more time checking on the backgrounds of the financial types who pitch for their business, and that — mostly — is a good thing.

The public used a regulatory database to check the records of 14.2 million stockbrokers and advisers last year, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, known as Finra, a self-regulatory group that’s financed by Wall Street. That’s more than double the 6.7 million searches in 2007, the year before the financial crisis began.

Nothing wrong with investors getting more vigilant, of course. But there are some important caveats about what investors get when they check in with a broker-vetting site.

Finra’s records don’t include lawsuits against brokers that aren’t considered “investment-related.” That means that a lot of brokers who are exposed to the possibility of big judgments have official records that say nothing about that exposure.

And then there’s the issue of the freebie websites popping up to help investors vet brokers. Check the fine print, and you learn that some of those sites get their revenues from advisors who pay to be featured. If you get it for free, and the broker pays to get his or her name in front of you on the site, can it really be investor-friendly?

I took a look at the broker background-checking business in my latest column for Bloomberg View. Read article.

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