March 6, 2012
Wall Street Journal
Daisy Maxey
Four years ago the market for auction-rate securities, an investment touted as safe and liquid, froze up. Four years later, despite various settlements and repayment efforts, many investors are still fighting for the return of their money. All told, about $100 billion from individual and institutional investors remains outstanding in the former $330 billion market, […]
March 5, 2012
Reuters
John Wasik
In an ideally-transparent world, you’d know as much about your broker as you know about the ingredients in packaged junk food label: All of the bad stuff would be instantly on display. But in the U.S., some of the most important information about a broker is off limits to individual investors. At present, you can […]
February 29, 2012
Business Week
Anthony Effinger, Katherine Burton and Donal Griffin
Vikram Pandit knows one way to make big money in hedge funds: sell them. In July 2007, Pandit sold Old Lane Partners LP to Citigroup Inc. for $800 million and pocketed $165 million for his stake. Then he took over the bank’s in-house hedge-fund group, now called Citi Capital Advisors, or CCA. He became chief […]
February 27, 2012
Reuters
Suzanne Barlyn
Ongoing efforts by regulators to give the public more details about financial advisers’ backgrounds still haven’t solved a key problem — getting more investors to use that information. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority recently took a step toward resolving that issue. In a notice on Tuesday, FINRA invited suggestions from the public on possible improvements […]
February 23, 2012
Yahoo! Sport UK
Morgan Keegan & Co is hoping to recover money lost to a professional sports agent, who was awarded $400,000 in a securities arbitration ruling against the brokerage last week. The Memphis, Tennessee-based firm filed a court action in New York on Wednesday to overturn the ruling by a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel, which […]