We’ve had the first siting of the new document request letter for the new presence exams. IA Watch has obtained a copy of the letter issued from the Atlanta Regional Office. This letter sets the exam period to start on March 30, 2012. That addresses some concerns that the SEC would look at period prior … Read more »
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for December 7
These are some of the compliance-related stories that recently caught my attention. High-Speed Trades Hurt Investors, a Study Says by Nathaniel Popper and Christopher Leonard in the New York Times A top government economist has concluded that the high-speed trading firms that have come to dominate the nation’s financial markets are taking significant profits from … Read more »
Phone Calls Can Get You Caught Insider Trading
The insider trading prosecution of Raj Rajaratnam was centered around phone calls. Prosecutors were able to get a recording of those calls. Can you get a conviction merely by tying phone calls to trades, without knowing the content of the calls? The Securities and Exchange Commission is hoping that old-fashioned phone call logs will be … Read more »
Airport Use as Illegal Inside Information
I’m a bit confused by the big story in Bloomberg about David Slaine, a key informant for the recent crackdown on insider trading. It starts off with Slaine trying to claim that a money manager was illegally using airplane flight information into Teterboro Airport to profit on stocks. The claim was that his tipsters would … Read more »
CFTC Relief for Funds of Funds
The CFTC has given funds of funds six more months to determine whether they needs to register as a commodity pool operator. Dodd-Frank has made interest rate and some foreign exchange derivatives “commodities” and made them subject to oversight by the CFTC. There is a December 31, 2012 deadline approaching. However, the CFTC rescinded guidance … Read more »
How to Get Caught Insider Trading
Thomas C. Conradt and David J. Weishaus were brokers at Euro Pacific Capital when they came across a golden source of information. IBM was getting ready to purchase SPSS, Inc. for $50 per share. Now the SEC is charging them with illegally trading on that inside information. Both are challenging the complaint, so we will … Read more »
Compliance Bricks and Mortar for November 30
These are some of the compliance related stories that recently caught my attention. What’s the Solution for Boring and Ineffective Compliance Training? by Joe Murphy in Corporate Compliance Insights My experience, having worked in depth with both live and online training, is that both have the potential to be done poorly and to fail in … Read more »
Extension of TAG
One of the many scary events in 2008 was that money had nowhere safe to go. The failure of the Reserve Fund meant cash was not safe and the banks were teetering, leaving corporate treasuries with no place to safely park the cash they would need to weather the financial crisis. Congress stepped in and … Read more »
What is a Commodity Pool?
The CFTC stretched when it said that a fund entering into even a single swap used purely for hedging purposes — will hold “commodity interests” and accordingly could be viewed as commodity pools by the CFTC. The CFTC has construed the concept of commodity pool broadly and has consistently maintained that there is no minimum … Read more »
Beverly Hillbillies Ciphering for Assets Under Management
It was a case of math failure. Where exactly should that decimal place go? The Barthelemy Group of New York and New Jersey calculated assets under management as $26.28 million. But it looks like the decimal point was in the wrong place and the firm actually had $2.628 million under management. Evens Barthelemy, the founder, … Read more »