RIA Insurance Mandates Didn't Reduce Access to Advisory Services
(Aug 2024)
By Craig McCann and
Chuan Qin
You can download a PDF of this article to print or email here
Introduction
Errors and omissions (E&O) insurance can help fund resolution of customer complaints against investment advisers. Many advisors are not insured or have minimal insurance, choosing to fund settlements and awards directly at the risk a particularly costly resolution might bankrupt the advisor. When advisors are unable to pay an adverse judgment, the investor suffers more than the...
2024 Brokerage Firm Risk Rankings
(Feb 2024)
By Craig McCann, Chuan Qin and Mike Yan
We previously published two papers ranking brokerage firms based on the complaint history associated with their current brokers and the complaints associated with brokers who they employed
at the time of the conduct being complained about, wherever those brokers are currently employed.
We recently updated our analysis of complaints against brokerage firms and found that our earlier results were extremely useful for identifying brokerage firms likely...
First National Realty Partners Reg D Offerings: Muppets Do Commercial Real Estate
(Dec 2022)
By Craig McCann, Susan Song, Chuan Qin, and Mike Yan.
You can read our previous posts Reg D offerings:
1) "Reg D Offerings Summary Statistics" here,
2) "$8 Trillion of Broker-Sold Reg D Offerings" here,
3) "HJ Sims Reg D Offerings: Heads Sims Wins, Tails their Investors Lose" here, and
4) "Inactive and Delinquent Reg D Issuers" here.
You can download and print or email this post by clicking here.
Introduction
In a recent note, we explained how HJ Sims executives formed 91 separate...
Is the Securities Industry Cleaning Up Its Hiring Practices? Nope
(Aug 2016)
Our BrokerCheck study, How Widespread and Predictable is Stock Broker Misconduct? and Egan Matovs and Seru's The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct have shined a spotlight on the persistence of bad brokers and the bad firms which give them a platform.
We have posted extensively based on our BrokerCheck research. In Have 1.3% or 7.3% of Stock Brokers Engaged in Misconduct? we explain that competing estimates of broker misconduct differ because of differences in definition of misconduct...
Another Bad Broker Falsifying his BrokerCheck
(Jul 2016)
Recently we posted about two brokers who had not disclosed that customer complaints had been adjudicated to arbitration awards in favor of the clients but rather continued to report them as pending up to 15 months after the arbitration award was rendered (Bad Brokers Falsify Their BrokerCheck Records and No One Notices) and showed that FINRA corrected these two brokers' BrokerCheck records (Bad Brokers' Incorrect Records Got Partially Corrected Last Week). Last week we identified a few more...
Things Go From Bad to Worse for BrokerCheck
(Jul 2016)
Last week we posted about two brokers who had not disclosed that customer complaints had been adjudicated to arbitration awards in favor of the clients but rather continued to report them as pending up to 15 months after the arbitration award was rendered. See Bad Brokers Falsify Their BrokerCheck Records and No One Notices. Two days ago we showed that FINRA corrected these two brokers' BrokerCheck records in Bad Brokers' Incorrect Records Got Partially Corrected Last Week. We'll let you...
Bad Brokers' Incorrect Records Got Partially Corrected Last Week
(Jul 2016)
We wrote that FINRA's BrokerCheck allowed brokers to report cases adversely resolved as "pending" last week, in Bad Brokers Falsify Their BrokerCheck Records and No One Notices.
We provided two examples. The first included a large award in FINRA's awards database that had not been correctly reported as adversely resolved on the broker's BrokerCheck but had been correctly reported on her employer's BrokerCheck. Our second example, was of two adversely resolved filings against another broker....
Bad Brokers Falsify Their BrokerCheck Records and No One Notices
(Jun 2016)
BrokerCheck records are supposed to accurately reflect brokers' registration, complaint and disciplinary history but, inexplicably, sometimes BrokerCheck records are materially false. Like other problems we've identified with BrokerCheck, there is an easy, low-cost fix.
We have recently written about the problems with FINRA's BrokerCheck and suggested a simple free market solution that would allow investors to protect themselves with no further regulation. How Widespread and Predictable is...
A Bad Broker Found His Firm; You Should Avoid Them Both
(Jun 2016)
In June 2016, a FINRA panel in Albuquerque, NM ordered Centaurus Financial, Inc. to pay the Claimant, a recent widow when the subject conduct began, $150,000 plus all hearing fees after reasoned findings that "the investments Hashemian recommended while at Centaurus were not suitable", that Centaurus was responsible for Hashemian's actions which "constituted fraudulent and negligently made misrepresentation and omitted material information in the sale of investments" and that "Centaurus...
