Currently, the Soreide Law Group is investigating the sales and marketing of Bluerock Real Estate's private placement offering of BR Senior Secured Debenture Trust, LLC. According to the description, "The Trust is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bluerock Real Estate, LLC (“Bluerock”). Bluerock is a national real estate investment firm headquartered in Manhattan, focused on acquiring, […]

Soreide Law Group, PLLC, is currently investigating the marketing and sales of non-traditional exchange traded funds (ETFs) to investors. Many of the country's leading banks – including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wells Fargo – were recently sanctioned by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for more than $9.1 million over their failure to supervise […]

Do security futures, a high risk investment, have a place in your investment portfolio? Depending on your risk tolerance, a key component of financial planning, and your understanding of security futures contracts, writes Adriana Reyneri, in an October article from "Millionare Corner." “Security futures involve a high degree of risk and are not suitable for […]

Levinski Dealexis Barnes (CRD #2292179, Registered Representative, Lutz, Florida) has been named a respondent in a FINRA complaint alleging that he discussed with a customer an investment in an accounting business that Barnes and other individuals were contemplating purchasing. The FINRA complaint alleges that Barnes told the customer that if the offer for the business […]

Andrew Martin Abern (CRD #1610607, Registered Principal, Miami, Florida) was censured and fined $25,000. Without admitting or denying the findings, Abern consented to the described sanctions and to the entry of findings that he provided some customers with VA expense disclosure forms that contained inaccurate information; the forms understated the annual expenses that would be […]

FINRA publishes a quarterly review to provide firms with a sampling of recent disciplinary actions involving misconduct by registered representatives. The sample includes settled matters and decisions in litigated cases (National Adjudicatory Council (NAC) decisions and SEC decisions in FINRA cases). These summaries call attention to, and remind registered representatives and member firms of, specific […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is looking into the VelocityShares 2x Long VIX Short Term Exchange Note, managed by Credit Suisse Group AG, which had about $700 million in assets before the decline, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. The Massachusetts’s securities regulator and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) […]

Broker-dealers' falling short in due diligence when selling complex, illiquid products has been a focus of FINRA examinations and fines since the market collapse of 2008, writes Bruce Kelly of InvestmentNews.com. FINRA recently fined and sanctioned a handful of broker-dealers that sold two series of private placements that imploded in 2009 — Medical Capital Holdings […]

FINRA Case Number 11-01278, awards $158,250.00 to the defrauded Claimants for the alleged supervisory failures of Harvest Capital, LLC, of Gregg Rennie and his branch office. Rennie is now serving a prison sentence for selling fictitious notes to investors. Since early 2007, Gregg Rennie, the popular radio host and financial advisor, defrauded numerous clients approximately […]