According to Investment News, in the wake of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scam and the recent financial meltdown, custodial firms are taking a tougher stance when it comes to the compliance they expect from registered investment advisers. This tighter scrutiny can make it hard for a new RIA with regulatory…
The US Supreme Court says that it won’t review a federal appeals court’s finding that even though an investor’s English was limited, he is still bound by a broker-customer agreement that any disputes over the handling of his account must be resolved through arbitration. The U.S. Court of Appeals for…
A district court judge in Minnesota has ruled that Wells Fargo & Co. must pay four Minnesota nonprofits $15 million or more in costs, fees, and interests for breach of fiduciary and securities fraud. The investment bank has already been slapped with a $29.9 million verdict in this case against…
A federal grand jury has indicted Adley Husni Abdulwahab on one count of conspiracy and five counts of Texas securities fraud in connection with an alleged $17 million investment scheme involving the sale of investments issued by W Financial Group. The Houston resident, who is also facing federal charges over…
A New York jury has found ex-Goldman Sachs & Co. computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov guilty of one count of transportation of stolen property in interstate and foreign commerce and one count of trade-secret theft. Aleynikov is accused of stealing a specialized computer source code used in high-frequency trading activity from…
Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre has denied brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co.‘s request to impound hundreds of records that are key in a dispute with an ex-employee. The ex-employee is James Dever, who used to be a manager at the broker-dealer’s Boston office. Judge McIntyre found that public interest in…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is affirming a district court’s ruling that Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. does not need to arbitrate a disputes over auction-rate securities losses suffered by the state of Louisiana and the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District (known collectively as LSED). The…
It is often said that one critical statement to a child offsets 10 positive ones. The same effect can be found in the stock market, where an analyst’s downgrade is worth, in dollars and cents, sometimes ten times that of an upgrade. Take for example the price movement of shares…
Two former Wachovia Securities LLC brokers, Eddie W. Sawyers and William K. Harrison, have been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with six counts of securities fraud. The two men, who previously operated Harrison/Sawyers Financial Services, are accused of defrauding at least 42 elderly investors of their retirement savings,…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has affirmed that an ex-Nordstrom Inc’s (JWN) technology official’s complaint that her firing violated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s whistleblower protections is untimely. According to Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., SOX’s 90-day limitations period started running on plaintiff Carole Coppinger-Martin’s last day on…