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Our experts frequently write blog posts about the findings of the research we are conducting.

Displaying 10 out of 94 results for "Futures-Based ETFs".

Howard Capital Management Funds Charge High Fees to Misuse Leveraged ETFs

(Jan 2024)

By Craig McCann and Susan Song

You can download a copy of this note to print or email here.

Introduction

Howard Capital Management ("HCM") is a SEC-registered RIA based in Roswell, GA.[1] In addition to advising individual accounts, it manages mutual funds and ETFs. It claims to use proprietary technical analysis, HCM-BuyLine(R), to market-time the funds' asset allocations.

Without any risk disclosure, HCM's mutual funds buy and hold leveraged ETFs for much longer periods than is...

Ohio Division of Securities, In the Matter of Timothy K. Fife - Ohio IA Registration to be Revoked

(Feb 2016)

In February 2016, after evidentiary hearings, the Hearing Examiner recommended that Timothy Fife's investment adviser representative registration be revoked. The Report and Recommendation is available on our website. Fife's registration is being revoked because he provided investment advice and initiated securities transactions while not licensed in Ohio and because he recommended the unsuitable purchase and holding for extended periods of time of leveraged and inverse ETFs. Dr. McCann ...

FINRA Enforcement Actions: Month in Review

(Jun 2014)

MAY 2014 SELECTED FINRA ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS

FIRMS FINED

ABN AMRO Clearing Chicago LLC (CRD #14020, Chicago, Illinois)
ABN AMRO Clearing Chicago LLC consented to a censure and $95,000 fine for allegedly failing "to report short interest positions to the New York Stock Exchange and FINRA on certain settlement dates, and submitt[ing] to FINRA an inaccurate short-interest position report." FINRA found that the firm's supervisory system did not provide for supervision reasonably designed to achieve...

FINRA Enforcement Actions: Month in Review

(May 2014)

APRIL 2014 SELECTED FINRA ENFORCEMENT ACTIONS

FIRMS FINED

The Huntington Investment Company (CRD #16986, Columbus, Ohio)
The Huntington Investment Company consented to a $25,000 fine and censure. The firm consented to an entry of "findings that it failed to provide notice to the MSRB via the Electronic Municipal Market Access System (EMMA) that no preliminary official statements or official statements were to be prepared for bond anticipation note offerings in which the firm participated."...

SEC Examiniation Priorities 2014

(Jan 2014)

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) senior staff recently announced their 2014 examination priorities . The national examination program will be focusing on fraud detection and prevention, corporate governance, and registrants that serve as both a broker-dealer and investment adviser.

SEC staff also plans to undertake initiatives that examine the rollover of retirement vehicles during employment transitions or near retirement. In particular, the staff is concerned about misleading...

FINRA Regulatory Priorities 2014

(Jan 2014)

Early this month, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) released their 2014 regulatory and examination proirities . FINRA is continuing to focus on the suitability of recommendations made to retail investors. FINRA specifically mentions complex structured products (including leveraged ETFs), non-traded REITs, frontier funds, and interest rate sensitive instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and municipal bonds. At a recent conference, a FINRA representative added that...

Self-Indexing in Commodity-Linked Investments - Citi CUBES

(Dec 2013)

Over the past few weeks and months, we've noticed a pattern in the products coming across our desks: structured investments linked to esoteric proprietary indexes, created by the same bank that issued the product. We touched on this topic a bit when we discussed self-indexing in the context of structured certificates of deposit, but we thought we'd revisit the issue with a few of the examples that we've been looking into more recently. The examples we'll discuss each reference a proprietary...

SPIVA Scorecard: Persistent Lack of Persistence

(Dec 2013)

Earlier this week, S&P Dow Jones Indices released their semiannual SPIVA Persistence Scorecard, which assesses how consistent top performingactively managed US equity mutual funds have been. This is the third SPIVA release since our blog has been in existence and each time we bring attention to their work. Once again, their results suggest that mutual fund managers only rarely outperform for long.

This year the study found that roughly 7% of funds that were in the top 25% of actively managed...

SEC Scrutinizing Exchange Traded Notes

(Dec 2013)

Risk.net is reporting that the Office of Capital Markets Trends of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the details of exchange traded notes (ETNs). The office, headed by Amy Starr, is looking into the fees and the disclosure of risks and formulas used to determine ETN indicative values according to statements made by Starr at the Structured Products conference in Washington, DC on December 10.

ETNs have been a frequent subject on the blog and regulators have issued...

Non-Transparent ETFs and Foreign Stock Funds

(Dec 2013)

Typically, it's better to know more about an investment rather than less. When it comes to mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), transparency means knowing what the fund is buying and selling, and therefore the underlying investment strategy.

Some commentators have claimed that fund transparency is a bad thing for investors. If a fund has a predictable investment strategy, then traders can front-run its trades, which may be large enough to move prices. The criticism is even louder...

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