Posts belonging to Category RBC Dain Raucher



Regulators Plan Legal Actions Over Improper Sales of ETFs and ETNs

 

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced plans to file enforcement actions against certain brokerages in connection with unsuitable sales of leveraged and inverse leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as well as for failure to train their brokers who sell them (see Reuters article by Suzanne Barlyn and Jessica Toonkel entitled “FINRA to bring cases over […]

Is the SEC Too Soft on Major Wall Street Firms?

 

Questions continue to arise regarding the too-cozy relationship between the SEC and Wall Street. Recent reports claim that the SEC, when settling with big Wall Street firms, has a practice of granting waivers that preserve special privileges enjoyed by those firms, and protect them from serious consequences that would otherwise result from their wrongdoing. For […]

Financial Advisers Winning Big Money from Former Firms

 

Financial advisers are winning large arbitration awards against their former firms. During the past three months at least three arbitration panels have ordered financial services firms to pay millions of dollars to financial advisers formerly employed by the firms.

Concerns Rise Regarding Wall Street Banks

 

Fitch Ratings issued a report on November 16 on the U.S. banking sector saying that “the risks of a negative shock are rising” if the effects of European debt crisis keep spreading. (“Fitch’s Warning Spooks Investors, ” Wall Street Journal).

Reverse Convertible Securities More Likely to Become Toxic as Market Swoons

 

The current free fall in the stock market is likely to activated the ticking time bombs that are hidden away in some investors’ portfolios. These time bombs are embedded in a type of structured product called Reverse Convertible Notes or Reverse Exchangeable Notes. The problem has to do with the way these products are structured.

Massachusetts Files Action Against RBC for Improper Sales of Exotic Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)

 

The Massachusetts securities division regulator has filed an administrative action against RBC Capital Markets LLC and one of its former registered representatives, Michael D. Zukowski relating to sales of inverse, leveraged, inverse-leveraged, and other non-traditional exchange traded funds. The regulator seeks an order, among other things, requiring RBC and Zukowski to make full restitution to […]

Morgan Keegan for Sale?

 

Regions Financial Corp. is trying to find a buyer for Morgan Keegan, but the clock is ticking, and the longer it takes, the greater the likelihood that its most valuable asset, the advisor reps, will leave, thereby reducing the value, and making a sale unlikely to happen at all, according to Andrew Osterand’s InvestmentNews article […]

Are Brokerage Firms Really the Trusted Financial Advisers that Their Advertisements Claim that They Are?

 

Expecting licensed professionals who provide investment advice to act in their clients’ best interests “should be a basic tenet of the business,” but brokerage firms and their brokers don’t want that fiduciary yoke, says Karen Blumenthal in her InvestmentNews article, “When Your Adviser Can’t Be Trusted.” Moreover, they don’t want the public to know that […]

Wall Street Whistleblower Program Already Paying Off

 

The new whistleblower program that pays big cash rewards for tips about investment fraud has already resulted in a large number of high quality tips to the SEC, according to a news story this week on CNBC. According to the report, the SEC expects to receive 30,000 tips this year?just one year after the program […]

Reverse Convertibles and Similar Structured Products are “Unsafe at any Speed”

 

Banks sold more than $6 billion of reverse convertible notes last year, promising income investors returns of up to 64 percent in this historically low interest rate environment; however, reverse convertibles lost money, on average, according to a recent InvestmentNews articles entitled “Hot new asset class has ‘failed on all counts.’” In fact, reverse convertibles […]