If My Aunt Had Balls She’d Be Mary Schapiro
by ilene - July 21st, 2010 12:33 am
If My Aunt Had Balls She’d Be Mary Schapiro
Courtesy of Larry Doyle at Sense on Cents
“If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle!!”
I love that line. I first heard it on the trading desk at Bear Stearns in the early ’90s. For the last twenty years, I have used the line often to counter those who would bemoan an outcome with the standard, “If only . . .” My response typically generates a healthy chuckle and we then move on.
At this point, I feel comfortable amending the line from above to “If my aunt had balls, she’d be Mary Schapiro.” Too harsh, you say? I think not. How so?
Let’s review a recent Wall Street Journal article, Madoff’s Ghost Still Haunts SEC:
Financial executives aren’t the only folks lawmakers are pursuing. They also want to see more heads roll at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Nearly 18 months after Bernie Madoff’s multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme was exposed and almost a year after the SEC’s inspector general issued a blistering report, lawmakers are still questioning how the SEC staffers who reviewed the Madoff firm and investigated fraud allegations were being punished.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro told Congress during an oversight hearing that 15 of 20 enforcement attorneys and 19 of 36 examination staffers that dealt with the Madoff matter had left the agency. The SEC was still conducting a disciplinary process, she said, but it should be concluded soon.
Republican Rep. Bill Posey of Florida –- home to many Madoff victims -– said he wants to know if those SEC employees ended up at other regulatory agencies, working for companies they were supposed to regulate, or retired with government pensions.
“There’s a necessity to know where they went,” said Posey. “It’s like letting a pedophile slink out the door or change neighborhoods. We’re dealing with the same type of problem here.”
Wow!! Representative Posey is being aggressive here, but I commend him because the nation still deserves answers to so many Madoff questions that have been swept under the SEC’s and FINRA’s rugs. The WSJ continues:
Schapiro strongly disagreed. “These aren’t bad people. In some cases they were people who were very junior and not adequately trained or supervised.” In other cases, she said, they were pulled from one project to another.
Junior people, my ass!! The people calling the shots on the Madoff investigation were…
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No Quarter Radio’s Sense on Cents with Larry Doyle Welcomes Phil Davis
by ilene - March 19th, 2010 5:14 pm
This should be a fun and educational interview – mark your calendar for Sunday evening, 8 pm ET. – Ilene
No Quarter Radio’s Sense on Cents with Larry Doyle Welcomes Phil Davis
Courtesy of Larry Doyle
I am thrilled to have Phil Davis join me this coming Sunday evening from 8-9 pm ET on No Quarter Radio’s Sense on Cents with Larry Doyle. Phil is one of the most widely followed financial market strategists today; he operates the highly visited website, Phil’s Stock World. In addition, Phil is a fellow contributing author at the popular financial website, Seeking Alpha. From Seeking Alpha, we learn more about Phil and why thousands follow his writing and insights:
Philip R. Davis is a founder of Phil’s Stock World (www.philstockworld.com), a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders. Mr. Davis is a serial entrepreneur, having founded software company Accu-Title, a real estate title insurance software solution, and is also the President of the Delphi Consulting Corp., an M&A consulting firm that helps large and small companies obtain funding and close deals. He was also the founder of Accu-Search, a property data corporation that was sold to DataTrace in 2004 and Personality Plus, a precursor to eHarmony.com. Phil was a former editor of a UMass/Amherst humor magazine and it shows in his writing — which is filled with colorful commentary along with very specific ideas on stock option purchases (Phil rarely holds actual stocks).
Please join me and Phil Davis this Sunday evening for what will assuredly be not only an education, but a riveting and engaging conversation as well. Do a friend a favor and share this with them. They will thank you.
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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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Goldman’s Prop Trading and Reputational Risk
by ilene - March 13th, 2010 1:25 pm
If you haven’t seen Larry Doyle’s website, Sense on Cents, it’s worth a visit and bookmark. Larry has over 20 years of experience on Wall Street, from trading mortgage-backed securities to serving as National Sales Manager for Securitized Products at JP Morgan Chase. Through his writing and radio program, Larry hopes to help his audience better understand the complexities of the economy, global finance and the markets.
Larry’s internet radio show, Sense on Cents with Larry Doyle, is on "No Quarter Radio" every Sunday night from 8-9PM. There are links here to previous interviews by Larry with Michael Panzner, and Steve Megremis, founder of The Daily Bail, and many others. - Ilene
Goldman’s Prop Trading and Reputational Risk
Courtesy of Larry Doyle at Sense on Cents
On Wall Street, information is everything.
Timely access to information as to who is buying/selling what, how much they are buying/selling, and why they are buying/selling is absolutely invaluable. The Wall Street banks fight tooth and nail to protect their information franchises.
That said, there are supposed to be rules as to how information is handled and processed so that trading complies with the rules of the road. Banks are not supposed to front run clients. Banks are not supposed to give up client names. Do the banks practice what the regulators preach?
Given the fact that Wall Street banks run both customer operations and proprietary desks, there are supposed to be Chinese walls in place to make sure that information is handled properly between desks. At the firms where I worked, the proprietary desks were either on a different floor from the customer desk or in an entirely different building.
Thank you to a friend of Sense on Cents for sharing a recently released report which would seem to indicate that the Chinese walls at Goldman Sachs would appear to be neither tall nor long (said in jest), but virtually non-existent.
Asset-Backed Alert, a Wall Street trade publication, reports:
Data-Sharing Worries Grip Goldman Clients
Investors are accusing Goldman Sachs of violating Wall Street code by permitting information-sharing between two types of collateralized debt obligation traders: those who work on behalf of clients and those who handle proprietary capital.Goldman currently has the two desks situated next to each other in its Lower Manhattan headquarters. They also have a common supervisor, managing director Jerry Ouderkirk. Such a lack of separation is
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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.