Tag Archives: finra

Wall Street Makes It Hard to Dig Up Dirt on Your Broker or Brokerage Firm

The securities industry doesn’t like the idea of reminding investors to check the records of their stock brokers. So when Finra suggested that there be a hyperlink on brokerage firms’ home pages to take customers to its BrokerCheck tool, the industry went on a letter-writing campaign to oppose it.

My personal favorite: The brokerage firm chief compliance officer who told Finra he was worried about “unscrupulous investors.” Yep, you read that right. Here’s my column for TheStreet on Wall Street’s latest anti-investor campaign.

Indicted Lawyers, Peeping Toms, Can Wind Up Judges in Finra Arbitration

Finra arbitration is often a surprise to investors — not least of all because so many Wall Street customers have no idea that they sign away their right to court when they open an account.

But how about the surprise of learning that one of your arbitrators had been indicted? Or that he had said he was a lawyer, but wasn’t?

My June 24 column for TheStreet tells about Finra’s latest surprise arbitrator — the guy who was arrested for being a Peeping Tom. Really. You can read it here.

Years of Overlooked Red Flags Catch Up to Stockbroker

Finra, the securities regulator that’s funded by Wall Street, got some attention last week when it said it was getting tougher on bad stockbrokers. The regulator said fines were going up and sanctions for fraud and the sale of unsuitable products were getting more onerous.

But Finra already had sanction guidelines that might have come to play in the case of Jerry A. Cicolani, Jr., a former broker who worked at Merrill Lynch and at Cleveland’s PrimeSolutions Securities Inc. Somehow, though, despite having been target of 69 customer complaints over the past 13 years, Cicolani wasn’t barred from the business until last September.

By that time, criminal authorities already were moving in with an investigation into his role in a Ponzi scheme. On May 1, he pleaded guilty to two criminal counts, including the sale of unregistered securities. He persuaded many of his former clients from Merrill and PrimeSolutions to invest in that scheme. I wrote about Cicolani in my story yesterday for The New York Times. You can read it here.

Why Only Big Bankers Can Flout the Rules and Get Away With It

Did you hear the one about the stock promoter, the lawyer, three figurehead CEOs and seven auditing firm partners?

No, it isn’t a “walks into a bar” joke. It’s a case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission last month against the players in a sham stock offering. The agency went after all the people involved in what it called “a massive scheme to create public shell companies through false registration statements.”

No big deal, right? The SEC is supposed to be going after bad guys, making them pay fines and lose privileges. But it tends to do a lot better in cases against no-name boiler room types like the ones in the January case than it does with players at powerful banks.

In my column for TheStreet this week, I discussed the contrast in enforcement results between cases against small players and cases against Wall Street’s elite.

In December, for example, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, brought cases against ten household name firms for flouting the rules that govern research analysts when their firms are pitching for initial public offering business. In its complaints against the firms, Finra described the actions of specific people who broke specific rules. But we never learned their names. Indeed they weren’t charged at all.  You can read my column here.

In Push for Change, Finra Is Opposed by the Wall St. Firms It Regulates

Brokerage firms are up in arms over a proposal by one of their regulators to collect information about customers’ accounts and use it to keep tabs on salespeople.

That may sound like a great idea on the face of it, but the regulator in question, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, gets its funding from the firms it’s supposed to be regulating. And those firms don’t like the idea of sharing data on their customers’ buys, sells and portfolio positions.

I wrote about the battle between Finra and its members in The New York Times today. Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told me that Finra’s proposal to get monthly data about activity in investors’ accounts could go a long way in preventing fraud because it would let Finra jump on problems more quickly:

“It creates a real deterrent,” she said. “Who’s going to churn an account if it immediately sends off a warning siren at Finra?”

You can read the story here.

Brokers Countersue to Thwart Suits by Unhappy Investors

So your broker sold you some shoddy private placements and you sued? Brace yourself, because you might get sued back.

In The New York Times today, I told the story of investors who sued their brokers for selling them private placements that tanked only to be hit with a suit from the broker. The firms’ argument: That the customers signed indemnification agreements when they purchased the securities, and thus owe the firms money for legal fees and other costs.

“The investors make representations to buy these things” and have a legal obligation to be truthful, said Vincent D. Louwagie, a Minneapolis lawyer who represented the brokerage firm Berthel Fisher.

It’s tough to evaluate the cases when the firms win. If you do business with a brokerage firm, you are stuck in private arbitration, where nobody has to explain how they came up with a decision. Suffice it to say, though, that a lot of customers will get spooked when they find out they’re threatened with a countersuit after they already have lost money. You can read the story here.

Unfazed by Finra Charges, Seniors Still Swoon for David Lerner Pitch

Elderly investors are looking for yield. And elderly investors are suckers for a free meal. Put the two together and you’ve got a recipe for packing the grand ballroom of a Marriott hotel with 300 sixty- and seventy-somethings who are prime targets for a brokerage firm looking to peddle illiquid investments.

David Lerner Associates, a Syosset, N.Y.-based brokerage firm whose founder was barred from the securities business for a year in 2012, is still out there wooing seniors to break bread at a local hotel and hear the pitch for its investments.

I went to one of those dinners at a Marriott hotel in Trumbull, Conn. in June, and wrote about it in my column tonight for TheStreet Foundation. Prominent in the pitch that night was the firm’s non-traded real-estate investment trust, a highly illiquid investment that I sure wouldn’t want my elderly mom to buy.

What’s stunning is that investors trip over themselves to attend Lerner events despite the firm’s history. From my story:

Finra said in a complaint on May 27, 2011 that Lerner and his firm targeted many “unsophisticated and elderly” clients to sell illiquid non-traded real-estate investment trusts that were concentrated in the hotel industry. The firm used misleading marketing techniques to sell the REITs, Finra said. In the months after the complaint, Finra said Lerner sent letters to 50,000 customers in an attempt to “counter negative press.” And even those letters had “exaggerated, false or misleading statements,” according to an amended Finra complaint on Dec. 13, 2011. The $14 million in fines and restitution against the firm was Finra’s largest monetary sanction of 2012, said Michelle Ong, a Finra spokeswoman.

You can read the story here.

Finally, the Regulators Are Trying to Protect You. But It’s Nothing But Bad News for Investors

Finra, which is the outfit that Wall Street pays to regulate itself, is pushing hard on a proposal that it thinks will help nail bad guys on Wall Street.

It sounds great on the surface: Give arbitrators permission to refer a rogue to the director of enforcement even as an investor’s hearing is going on. You know, so we can catch people like Bernie Madoff, who was such a trusted name on Wall Street that he was chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market.

As of now, arbitrators have to wait until a hearing is over before they can tell headquarters that a villain is on the loose. Finra wants to be able to get on the case ASAP.

Nice idea, if only it didn’t have the potential to wreak havoc on the arbitration hearing of the poor slob who’s in the middle of trying to get his or her case resolved. It’s yet another example of the nutty things that can happen when you bar investors from going to court, where you don’t have all the secrecy of arbitration and thus don’t have to jump through hoops to figure out ways to get the word out. Here’s my story published tonight on TheStreet.com.