First New York Securities LLC and four of its ex-traders have reached a settlement with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority over allegations that they improperly covered short positions involving secondary offering shares, as well as engaged in associated oversight failures. Per the FINRA settlement, First New York Securities LLC will…
Members of 16 different California households were sold shares of APEX Equity Options Fund which collapsed in August 2007. Collectively, these investors lost almost $9 million. They contacted an experienced securities law firm which advised them to jointly file a claim in Securities Arbitration through The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority…
Tales of the stock market crash of 1929 contain images of victims jumping from windows of Wall Street buildings. An eerily sign of the similarities to the current 21st Century crash may be the recent suicide of a despondent broker at Deutsche Bank Alex Brown Securities (Deutsche Bank), who left…
Merrill Lynch will pay $7 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission administrative charges that the investment bank neglected to protect customers whose orders were transmitted over “squawk boxes.” The penalty is the second highest fine that the SEC has imposed for cases involving Section 15(f) of the 1934 Securities…
The Texas State Securities Board has fined Wachovia Securities $4 million for misleading investors about auction-rate securities. The Wells Fargo & Co unit must also have completed buying back ARS from investor clients in Texas by June 30. This is the final step in the auction-rate securities case against Wachovia…
Stifel Financial Corp says that subsidiary Stifel Nicolaus & Co. Inc. will buy back all of its customers’ auction-rate securities in the next three years. This is a significant change from its initial offer to purchase 10% of the clients’ ARS holdings. The ARS repurchase will occur in four stages:…
According to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman, investors who were defrauded by R Allen Stanford and Bernard Madoff can claim these theft losses as deductions when filing their taxes. The IRS announced these new procedures on Tuesday. These new IRS rules are applicable to victims of any Ponzi scam…
According to a TD Ameritrade Institutional survey, most investment advisers continue to tell their clients that now is a great time to invest in the financial market rather than encouraging them to cash out their investments in the wake of the financial crisis: • 93% of investment advisers are not…
In 2007, Morgan Keegan settled an arbitration claim with the Indiana Children’s Wish Fund for an undisclosed amount. The charity had reported losing $48,000 in a mutual fund it had invested in with the brokerage firm. The Wish Fund became involved in mortgage securities after a local banker persuaded the…
A US District Court judge says Moody’s Corp. investors can go ahead in part with a lawsuit accusing the credit rating agency of securities fraud. The class action lawsuit accuses Moody’s of claiming it was an independent body that impartially published accurate financial instrument ratings when such misrepresentations artificially inflated…