As wirehouses fight to keep brokers from moving to the independent channels, warring wirehouses are adding fuel to the fire. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC and Merrill Lynch are going toe-to-toe by offering top reps a recruiting package of up...

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Lawyers at SNSFE have commenced an investigation into the activities of John M. Leonard who has done business as High Net Worth Securities located in Illinois and Florida. Mr. Leonard formerly was associated with Workman Securities Corp. Specifically, SNSFE is...

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SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro's recent speech to the securities industry, entitled, "The Road to Investor Confidence," certainly was not designed to win over friends from Wall Street. Prefacing her remarks by blaming Wall Street for the "recent crisis" (it didn't...

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SNSFE is investigating exchange-traded funds, known as ETFs. Both the regulators and class action lawyers are paying close attention to that category of exchange-traded funds that are known as leveraged or inverse. These funds made heavy bets either on the...

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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined Scottrade $600,000 for failing to have adequate anti-money laundering procedures in place to detect and report suspicious transactions. In a statement, FINRA noted that as an online brokerage executing more than 150,000 trades daily,...

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Stifel Financial Corp., which has been expanding its Stifel Nicolaus & Co. retail-brokerage business, is about to make a push into serving registered investment advisers. The firm has hired a veteran from Merrill Lynch and Pershing to run its Century...

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Schwab Adviser Services is eliminating fees on a database that helps advisers sell and buy other firms, a move that's part of a broader effort to enhance its business consulting services for independents. In addition to eliminating fees tied to...

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Risky Reg D deals worry state regulators according to a recent InvestmentNews article. The collapse of two high-risk private placement deals over the summer has shed light on the process by which broker-dealers bring these deals to market. Many are...

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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently fined a broker-dealer and investment adviser $100,000 for failing to protect the privacy of customer information. Let's examine what went wrong and how customers at the firm, Commonwealth Equity Services, LLP d/b/a Commonwealth...

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