BrokeAndBroker.com Blog by Bill Singer Esq WEEK IN REVIEW

January 14, 2023

https://www.brokeandbroker.com/6832/webull-fidelity-amc/
In today's featured FINRA Arbitration we got a mess involving a transfer of a customer account from Webull Financial to Fidelity. We got a misspelled customer's name. We got covered calls that wound up as naked options sales. We got a busted position and a margin call. Maybe the customer sustained losses. Maybe not. And then we have a pro se customer asked to prove that a purported contract didn't exist. What we don't have are answers. That's just not acceptable when it comes to a public, published FINRA Arbitration Award.

https://www.brokeandbroker.com/6831/version-sample-margin/
It's 2023. Except we're considering a FINRA Arbitration Award involving margin transactions from 2006 in an E*TRADE customer account. Or not. Or, if the trades did take place on margin, then we need to look at a version of a 1998 account document. A version? As in not the actual document but merely a version? On top of that, we are asked to consider a sample of statements. A sample? As in not the actual statements but merely a sample? Hey, they're not my words -- they're in the FINRA Arbitration Award.

https://www.brokeandbroker.com/6828/finra-nac-makkai/
A recent FINRA National Adjudicatory Council Decision considered the appeal of a former LPL rep, who was found by a FINRA Office of Hearing Officers Hearing Panel to have wrongfully paid commissions to a former colleague. The relatively esoteric nature of the misconduct at issue -- the failed purchase of another rep's book of business -- is underscored by the modest sanctions imposed by the OHO of a $2,000 fine and a 10-businsess day suspension, and, thereafter, increased by the NAC to a $5,000 fine and a 30-calendar-days suspension. All well and fine as far as BrokeAndBroker.com Blog publisher Bill Singer, Esq. is concerned; however, Bill is quite angered by FINRA's lack of transparency when it comes to the NAC and its upward revision of the OHO sanctions.

https://www.brokeandbroker.com/6830/zombie-ira-finra/
Indeed, death is certain. What is less certain on Wall Street is whether on a post-mortem basis the dead are capable of transferring their IRA accounts to living relatives. You'd sort of think that the answer to the question was "no;" however, as a recent FINRA regulatory settlement demonstrates, what we think is an obvious answer isn't always so. Life and death have ways of surprising us!