New Tool Helps Firms Meet SEC Rule Confluence Technologies has unveiled “Confluence Unity Rex,” which it says is a tool that will help firms comply with the SEC’s Tailored Shareholder Reports (TSR) rule. The solution provider says that Confluence Unity Rex “mines and pinpoints discrepancies in language and numeric information between financial reports,” and that… Read More >>
CAT Data Helps SEC Build Insider Trading Case
The ambitious, big data, securities transaction monitoring project known as the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) helped SEC officials build a case in an alleged, multi-year, insider trading scheme that yielded $47 million for the accused perpetrators, according to the SEC. “The SEC staff analyzed trading using the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) database to uncover [Alan]… Read More >>
FINRA Fines Morgan Stanley for Faulty Research Reports
FINRA, the broker-dealer industry’s self-regulator, alleges that — in the space of less than one year — Morgan Stanley “published approximately 11,000 equity research reports that included price charts with inaccurate historical stock ratings.” Eleven thousand! Oops. FINRA hit the venerable firm, which traces its history back to 1935 and the advent of the Glass-Steagall… Read More >>
FINRA Fines Citi for Alleged U4 Filing Woes
Citigroup Global Markets has been censured by FINRA, the financial-industry’s self-regulatory authority, and will pay a $375,000 fine for alleged failures regarding Form U4 filings for its registered representatives. A form U4 is the Uniform Application for Securities Industry Registration or Transfer. Those forms would have disclosed the Citigroup reps’ “unsatisfied tax liens and judgments,”… Read More >>
Neovest Charged with Acting as an Unregistered Broker
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC) will be paying a $2.75 million penalty to settle SEC allegations that its Neovest subsidiary was acting as an unregistered broker-dealer for more than a decade in addition to its role as an order and execution management system (OEMS) vendor. This case marks the first time that the SEC has penalized… Read More >>
Bloomberg Settles Charges It Misled Tradebook Customers
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed “settled charges” against registered broker-dealer Bloomberg Tradebook LLC, founded in 1996 but no longer in operation, for “making material misrepresentations and omitting material facts” about how the firm handled certain customer trade orders. Bloomberg Tradebook has agreed to be censured and will pay a $5 million dollar… Read More >>
Banca IMI Pleads Guilty to ADR Bid-Rigging
Banca IMI Securities Corp., a New York broker-dealer, has pled guilty to an antitrust charge and been sentenced to pay a criminal penalty “in excess of $2 million for its involvement in a bid-rigging conspiracy for certain financial instruments,” the U.S. Department of Justice reports. Those financial instruments are pre-release American Depository Receipts (ADRs), which… Read More >>
Piper Jaffray Will Acquire Weeden & Co.
Piper Jaffray Companies, which encompasses an investment bank and asset management firm, has acquired 100 percent of broker-dealer Weeden & Co. in a move that will combine Weeden’s agency execution support for equities with Piper’s research sales platform. The combination will target institutional clients requiring execution services, officials say. “The combined trading platform will be… Read More >>
SEC Alleges Brokerage Put Client Concerns Second
The SEC reports that a Los Angeles-based broker-dealer, privately held Electronic Transaction Clearing (ETC), is settling charges that it “illegally placed more than $25 million of customers’ securities at risk in order to fund its own operations.” As part of the settlement, ETC, which is regarded as a carrying broker-dealer because it “maintains custody of… Read More >>
SEC Pushes to Shed Light on Dark Pool Operations
The SEC has voted to propose new operational-transparency and regulatory-oversight rules for alternative trading systems that trade stocks listed on a national securities exchange (NMS stocks), including “dark pools.” So-called dark pools of liquidity, on private exchanges not available to the general public, have not — at least until now — been transparent, by definition…. Read More >>
