Tag Archives: Sifma

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.

Looking To Get Financially Literate? Don’t Expect Business “Educators” to Help

April is Financial Literacy Month, which is supposed to be a time when we marvel at the progress we’ve made in making the public smarter about finance.

Yet after nearly two decades of effort, the studies not only show little progress, but actual backsliding in the public’s financially savvy.

The problem has much to do with who’s in back of most literacy efforts: business. A credit card company isn’t going to warn you not to spend more than you can pay off in a given month, and a brokerage firm isn’t going to send you to Finra’s BrokerCheck to be sure you’re broker isn’t a sleazeball.

I wrote about the problems with literacy efforts in my column for TheStreet. You can read it here.