38 stock loan traders from A.G. Edwards, Morgan Stanley, Oppenheimer, and Nomura Securities are accused of stealing over $12 Million in stock loan kickbacks from their Wall Street firms. The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the employees with the more than $12 million theft. The SEC says that from…
Merrill Lynch will soon report third quarter earnings which analysts have revised downward. An analyst at competitor Goldman Sachs says that Merrill’s earnings for the third quarter will be about $1.80 per share, down from $1.95 and lowered Merrill’s stock price target to $94 from $108. The Goldman analyst predicted…
The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed Morgan Stanley $7.5 million to settle charges that it provided insufficient written trade confirmations to its customers for municipal securities and bonds. Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Inc, a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, furnished customers with trade confirmations that had missing or incorrect information…
NYSE Regulation fined 14 of its member firms a total of $10.4 million in fines for failing to deliver trade confirmations to their clients and other violations. Citigroup Global Markets received the heaviest fine of $2.25 million for failing to deliver trade confirmation documents in more than a million consumer…
The NASD imposed a $200,000 fine against EKN Financial Services Inc. and levied sanctions against the firm’s CEO, President, Head Trader and Financial and Operations Principal for improper short selling in connection with three unregistered PIPE securities offerings. As part of the settlement, EKN was also suspended for six months…
A recent study conducted by the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association indicates that securities arbitrators frequently agree to erase past settlements that were paid to investors from brokers’ records. Removing brokers’ settlement payments from their histories could cause future investors to not find out about the brokers’ past misconduct. The…
The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) recently absorbed the regulatory unit of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and changed its name to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Yet nothing has really changed. The primary regulator of securities brokerage firms industry is run solely by … brokerage firms.…
A former broker and branch manager of a Michigan office of GunnAllen Financial, Inc. are accused of selling fraudulent investments. His clients, many of whom are retirees, recently learned that the partnership investments may have been part of a Ponzi scheme. According to reports, a mastermind of the scheme stated…
Last week, a securities law journal published a study illustrating how securities regulators went “soft” last year. According to the study, NYSE and NASD fined securities companies and individuals $111 million in 2006, which was lower than the $184 million in collective fines that their two regulatory units issued in…
The Florida Office of Financial Regulation and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are investigating Michael O. Traynor and his son, Matthew O. Traynor, former brokers at InterSecurities, Inc. Complaints from at least a dozen investors allege that the Traynors defrauded clients out of approximately $8 million. In addition to…