Industry lawyer Aegis Frumento tries to make sense out of Rule 10b-5 -- a mere 118 words that have bedeviled securities lawyers for years. What is the difference between a "scheme . . . to defraud" and a "practice, or course of business which operates . . . as a fraud or deceit"? Ah, yes, the stuff of lawsuits, opinions, and treatises! Join Aegis as he tries to make sense out of the senseless.
FINRA Small Firm advocate Stephen Kohn is running for the FINRA 2022 Small Firm Governor. Stephen is supported by many reform voices in the FINRA Small Firm community and is supported by Bill Singer, Esq., an outspoken critic of regulatory incompetency and the publisher of the Securities Industry Commentator and the BrokeAndBroker.com Blog. Stephen offers his supporters the "opportunity to join and meet like-minded small firm executives and show FINRA that we are not a rag-tag group of greedy opportunists but a group of members that really care about the well-being of our clients, the investing public." VOTE FOR STEPHEN KOHN!!!!
Today's featured lawsuit is about a guy who almost made it onto the PGA tour, but then wound up playing through at Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, UBS; and, among the divots in his life was an $850,000 debt owed to UBS and a $1 million debt owed to a family office. Upon filing for Chapter 7 in April 2019, our golfer apparently failed to schedule on his petition two sets of golf clubs and his Winged Foot Golf Club membership. Ah yes, the stuff of federal lawsuits!
What happens when you have a FINRA Arbitration Award that combines circular logic with a nested loop and a Mobius strip? Well, you sort of wind up with a Respondent, who, if he were acting as an independent contractor, he would be covered under the Independent Contractor Agreement at issue; however, if he's not acting as an IC, then he's not covered under the IC Agreement because there wasn't any non-IC transaction in which Respondent participated, and, as such, he's not entitled to non-IC commissions for not having participated in any non-IC transactions, which didn't arise anyway.