A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority panel arbitration panel says that Morgan Stanley (MS) must pay at least $2.4M to settle the latest client claims accusing its former broker, Steven Mark Wyatt, of mishandling their investments. The brokerage firm fired Wyatt in 2012. According to a group of doctors and their…
Exchange-traded fund manager F-Squared Investments Inc. has filed for bankruptcy. The firm wants the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to allow it to sell its intellectual property, including its investment strategies and contracts to manage money, to Broadmeadow Capital, a Chicago-based money manager. It was in December…
A client of Wells Fargo Advisors (WFC) is looking to recover at least $100,000 in damages for losses he sustained from investing with F-Squared Investments Inc. The arbitration case comes six months after F-Squared consented to pay $35 million to resolve Securities and Exchange Commission charges accusing the asset manager…
Kara Stein, an SEC commissioner, is calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether exchange-traded funds and alternative funds are managing to get around certain rules and placing investors at risk. Stein said that both types of funds, which use high-risk complex investment strategies or place their money…
CNBC reports that according to a recent survey, advisors are preferencing exchange-traded funds over any other investment choice, in part because of their transparency, liquidity, and low costs. ETFs can also be traded throughout the day and are primarily passive. Their expense ratio is lower than actively managed mutual funds…
F-Squared Investments Inc. has laid off 40 workers-that’s one-fourth of its staff-as it continues to deal with the ongoing asset losses in the wake of the securities fraud charges filed against it by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year. During a routine examination, the regulator discovered that the…
SEC Accuses Elm Tree Investment Advisors, its Founder, of $17M Securities Fraud The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed fraud charges against Elm Tree Investment Advisors LLC and its founder Frederic Elm for running a Florida-based securities scam that raised over $17 million in a little over a year. The…
F-Squared Investments Inc. has consented to pay $35M to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges accusing the firm of making false claims regarding the performance of a key investment product. F-Squared admitted that it misled clients for several years about its AlphaSector strategy. F-Squared is the largest marketer of index…
In a preliminary ruling, The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said it expects to reject BlackRock Inc.’s (BLK) proposal to put out a nontransparent exchange-traded fund. BlackRock sought permission to sell the ETF from the regulator in 2011. The fund wants to keep its investments secret, which go against SEC…
The Securities and Exchange Commission is getting ready to revisit a 2008 rule proposal about exchange-traded funds. In the wake of new issues that have cropped up since then, changes to the original proposal are likely. Speaking at the Investment Company Institute’s Mutual Fund and Investment Management Conference this week,…