In a report from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's website, it was announced on August 10, 2011, the SEC charged Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., a St. Louis-based broker-dealer, and former Stifel Senior Vice President David W. Noack with defrauding five Wisconsin school districts by selling them unsuitably risky and complex investments funded largely […]

 Josh Funk, a business writer for the AP wrote that  TD Ameritrade has agreed to a $10 million settlement for failing to properly supervise representatives who misled investors about the safety of a money-market mutual fund that "broke the buck" in 2008, the Securities and Exchange Commission said. Funk writes that TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. customers who still hold […]

It was reported that on July 22, 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released a report from its Life Settlements Task Force which recommended that the SEC urge Congress to amend the federal securities laws to include life settlements as securities. The SEC report also recommended that the SEC monitor brokers and providers to assure […]

In an article from InvestmentNews.com, Mark Schoeff Jr., writes that broker-dealers have been engaging in sales practices for structured securities products that hurt retail investors, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) report released in July. The article goes on to say that in an examinations of 11 broker-dealers, the SEC found that the firms […]

Securities Attorney, Lars Soreide, of Soreide Law Group, PLLC, would like all investors to take note of the warnings coming from both FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission this past week. FINRA has warned all investors to watch for structured products that are callable, promise principal protection or have returns […]

The following article was posted on FINRA's website: WASHINGTON — It was announced that The Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Office of Investor Education and Advocacy and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have issued an investor alert called Structured Notes with Principal Protection: Note the Terms of Your Investment to educate investors about the risks […]

In a June 29, 2011, article by Bruce Kelly for InvestmentNews.com he writes that as part of a settlement with eight states and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Raymond James Financial Inc. will buy back $300 million in auction-rate securities from clients and pay a fine of $1.7 million. The states in charge of the […]