FINRA Story
by ilene - March 17th, 2010 9:12 pm
Larry Doyle’s been reporting on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) for over a year. His efforts are beginning to pay off. Recently, investigators from the government watchdog unit, the Project on Government Oversight, referenced Larry’s work in a letter sent to banking, finance, and oversight sub-committees up on the Hill regarding FINRA. Here’s three important posts by Larry that help tell the FINRA story. – Ilene
Barron’s Highlights FINRA’s Stench
Courtesy of Larry Doyle at Sense on Cents, posted on March 6, 2010
The stench surrounding FINRA is attracting real attention.
The executives of Wall Street’s self-regulatory organization FINRA should not think that the recent dismissal of one legal complaint is reason for celebration. Why? Those who care for transparency measure success not in terms of judicial victories but to a much greater extent by public pressure and awareness. On that note, at long last real progress in creating transparency into FINRA is occurring.
From the highly regarded government watchdog Project on Government Oversight to now the leading weekend business periodical Barron’s, FINRA’s stench is attracting attention from more than the blogosphere and a few selected journalists (Bloomberg’s Susan Antilla, The Washington Examiner’s and Baltimore Sun’sMarta Mossburg, and also Barron’s Jim McTague).
The news in an article this weekend by Barron’s is not news to regular readers of Sense on Cents, but to most of America FINRA remains a foreign entity. Those days are changing.
Barron’s excoriates Wall Street’s self-regulator today in writing, FINRA, First Heal Thyself:
IN 2007-08, regulators at FINRA were so distracted with empire-building and lining their pockets, they overlooked the world’s two largest Ponzi schemers: Bernie Madoff and, allegedly, R. Allen Stanford. So what’s the deeply flawed Financial Industry Regulatory Authority up to now? Building itself an even bigger empire.
The quasigovernmental body, which advertises itself as the white knight of 90 million investors, is lobbying Congress for the power to regulate 11,000 investment advisors who now fall under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and state securities regulators. The states regulate those with less than $25 million in assets, but want Congress to bump that to $100 million. Why? The SEC does such a poor job, it visits an average of one advisor every nine to 11 years!
Finra currently regulates Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange brokers and securities dealers, and pays its executive staff high-on-the-hog salaries, despite abysmal performances. This is the same behavior that contributed to the failure
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Madoff’s Other Legacy
by ilene - August 16th, 2009 3:04 pm
Madoff’s Other Legacy
By Justin Fox, courtesy of TIME
One day in fall 2007, I found myself on the 19th floor of the Manhattan skyscraper known as the Lipstick Building, listening to Bernie Madoff explain to me how he made money. This was in preparation for a discussion called the Future of the Stock Market that I was moderating; Madoff was a participant. (It’s a big hit on YouTube — just Google "Madoff video.") Sadly, he didn’t happen to mention the now infamous Ponzi scheme he was running two floors below us. At issue was his legit business, a brokerage that had long been one of the biggest marketmakers (the firms responsible for keeping trading going) on the Nasdaq exchange.
"You’ve heard of payment for order flow, right?" Madoff asked. "Huh?" I responded. Madoff explained that Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities had pioneered the practice of paying customers to trade through it, thereby siphoning business away from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The firm was able to use its sophisticated computer systems and trading algorithms to earn enough off the spreads between what it bought and sold stocks for to more than offset the amount it paid customers.
This was my first glimpse into the strange modern methods of making money from making markets in stocks. Madoff’s version of it was actually outdated by the time he explained it to me. With the government-ordered advent of decimalization in 2000 (stocks were previously traded in eighths of a dollar) and the rise of nimble competitors, the big spreads that Madoff Securities once feasted on were already a thing of the past.
Since 2007, the evolution has accelerated. Less than a third of the trading in NYSE-listed stocks is now done through the NYSE — and only a tiny fraction of that by the floor traders, who now function mainly as a colorful backdrop for CNBC broadcasts. Virtually all stock-trading is electronic, and somewhere from 45% to 70% of trading volume is done by high-frequency traders who make their money by the millisecond.
In the past few weeks, all this has become controversial. Flash orders — a feature offered by some exchanges that allows high-volume traders the advantage of posting orders for up to half a second and then removing them — have drawn the ire of the authorities. Related revelations about the high-speed, almost fully computerized…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.