Articles Tagged with Market-timing

In their amicus curiae brief, a number of ex-SEC Commissioners and top officials told the U.S. Supreme Court that the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to revive the agency’s antifraud cases against investment advisory officials Bruce Alpert and Marc Gabelli was a mistake. The men, who are Gabelli Funds LLC’s COO and portfolio manager, respectively, are accused of taking part in allegedly questionable market-timing practices involving the selling and buying of mutual fund shares to take advantage of short-term price swings.

Per the SEC’S 2008 securities case, Alpert and Gabelli committed these alleged violations between September 1999 and August 2002. While the district court threw out most of the lawsuit, finding that the majority of allegations were either untimely or not legally sufficient, the appeals court disagreed and reversed that ruling. It said that the defendants failed to fulfill the burden of demonstrating that a reasonably diligent plaintiff would have identified the alleged fraud more than five years before the SEC submitting its action.

Amicus curiae brief: A brief is a statement of the law and the impact on the law or other persons if a case if decided a certain way. “Amicus curiae,” is Latin for “friend of the court.” This “friend” can be any non-party to the lawsuit that has an opinion about it. Feasibly, there could be 100 such briefs, but the court would only be interested in those from credible groups, persons or lawyers.