Brian Smiley comments in Smart Money on investor choices.
In this great litigious nation, you can sue just about anyone – your doctor, your mechanic, even your dog walker. Just not your stockbroker. Angry brokerage customers – and these days, there are plenty of them – have long been forced to take their complaints before a panel of arbitrators, a process, critics say, that is far from consumer-friendly.
Brian Smiley comments in Wall Street Journal on PIABA’s petition to the SEC.
Attorneys who represent investors have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to drop a requirement that a securities-industry representative sit on arbitration panels.
Business Week quotes Brian Smiley on toxic debt in bond funds sold to seniors.
The subprime securities that created carnage on Wall Street are bringing new pain to Main Street. Regulators in five states are investigating whether Memphis brokerage Morgan Keegan failed to disclose the risks of seven mutual funds stuffed with toxic debt and whether it inappropriately sold them to seniors and other small investors. Six lawsuits and dozens of arbitration cases claim it did. Continue reading
Bloomberg quotes Brian Smiley about ‘institutional misconduct’ on Wall Street.
Let’s say you had $50,000 in auction- rate securities that your broker said were as safe as money- market funds. The market collapsed and you sold at an 80 percent haircut. At your arbitration hearing, one of the three panel members works at a firm that also sold auction rates deceptively. How fair will the hearing be? Will the industry let this conflict of interest stand? Continue reading
Brian Smiley mentioned in Communications Workers of America
Like many CWA members, Gwen Sims had a lump sum pension option, and she chose the cash payout instead of a monthly pension benefit when she retired from Bell South in 2000 at age 50.
Brokerage firm settles with state over sales practices at Proctor & Gamble plant in Augusta
Brokerage firm A.G. Edwards & Sons will pay a $500,000 fine and reimburse the state $200,000 for its investigation into stock fraud, bringing to a close a case that resulted in the largest securities settlement ever in Georgia.
Atlanta Business Chronicle reports on a punitive damage award for a factory worker.
The arbitration panel that heard the first of about 75 cases against the Augusta office of the brokerage firm A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. has awarded the former client in the case nearly $1 million.
Columnist Andrew Leckey cites Brian Smiley on a broker’s duties.
Investing is not a game.
That point is brutally driven home during every bear market, when dreams are shattered and investors doubt themselves, their brokers and even the financial system. Continue reading
Brian Smiley: “99 times out of 100, if a broker is liable, the firm is.”
In the spring of 2000, just as the 2 1/2-year stock market slide was getting under way, Rickey Miller of Homer City was a little uneasy about his portfolio as he headed off on a cruise to Tahiti. So he called his broker, Paul N. Lehnert of Beckman Investment Securities in Cranberry, and ordered him to sell everything. Continue reading
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