The US Supreme Court is likeley to come out shortly with its ruling on same sex marriages. The ruling may have an impact on fundraising for private funds and other private placements. One of the standards for private placements of securities is that the investors generally need to meet the definition of “accredited investors.” For [...]
Regulation of Investment Advisers
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently published a compendium describing the regulation of investment advisers: Regulation of Investment Advisers. It’s not light reading, but the 59-pages provide a helpful overview of investment adviser regulation. It comes from the Staff of the Investment Adviser Regulation Office in the Division of Investment Management. So it carries a [...]
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for June 14
These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention. Investor Alert—Don’t Trade on Pump-And-Dump Stock Emails FINRA and the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy are issuing this Investor Alert to warn investors to be on the lookout for email spam promoting “pump-and-dump” stock scams. SEC Compliance Program Annual Reviews: A [...]
The Leaky Merger and Insider Trading
On December 21, 2009, Sanofi-Aventis, a French pharmaceutical company, announced a tender offer for Chattem, a Tennessee-based distributor of over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, at the price of $93.50 per share. Shares of Chattem closed 32.60% higher than the prior trading day’s close of $69.98 and volume increased more than 3,000% to 10.3 million shares. This may [...]
Action in Congress
Robert Kaiser was granted rare access to the action behind the scenes of the creation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Act of Congress is an enjoyable study of the enactment of that law, used as tool to explore how Congress works, and largely how it it doesn’t work. Kaiser was already an [...]
Red Flags for Insider Trading
Badin Rungruangnavarat was very lucky. He invested a bunch of cash from May 21 to May 28. When the market closed on May 29 he had unrealized gains of over $3 million and had achieved a return in excess of 3000%. Now he is unlucky because the Securities and Exchange Commission froze his investment gain [...]
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for June 7
These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention. Madoff: Don’t let Wall Street scam you, like I did By Sital S. Patel in MarketWatch After all those years of racing to remain a step ahead of the authorities, Madoff has a few ideas about how the market can be made more [...]
Money Market Fund Changes Proposed
On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed several reforms to money market funds. Changes to money market funds has been in the works since 2008 after the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck” at the height of the financial crisis. The SEC published two proposals. Under the first alternative, prime institutional money market funds [...]
A Manual of Style for Compliance
I’ve seen some poorly drafted compliance policies. The source of the problem is usually that they were written by lawyers, for lawyers. That is good when it comes to defending your firm against a lawsuit. But it’s a bad thing if the policy does not clearly tell the employees what they can do and what [...]
Doesn’t Matter if Real Estate is a Security if You Lie to the Feds
I continue to look at the margins where real estate and securities meet, so any case brought by the SEC against an real estate firm catches my eye. The latest to catch my attention was an investigation into Robert J. Vitale and his investment company, Realty Acquisitions & Trust. While there might be some argument [...]
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