Monthly Archives: January 2017

As was recently reported on January 24, 2017 by industry publication AdvisorHub (“Morgan Stanley Boots $6 Million New York City Producer”), Morgan Stanley Wealth Management has fired “three brokers on a high-producing New York City team” that conducted business as PC Wealth Management.

Michael F. Paesano, who joined Morgan Stanley in 2011 and had previously been associated with UBS Financial for a number of years, was “discharged” on December 21, 2016 in connection with “allegations relating to employee’s exercise of discretion and investment strategy.” According to his FINRA BrokerCheck report, financial advisor Paesano has been the subject of fifteen (15) customer complaints and, in September of 2016, the Internal Revenue Service filed a tax lien against him for the reported amount of $142,956.

The two (2) other brokers who were terminated by Morgan Stanley – Jeffrey Cadan and Richard Perkins – were also reportedly terminated in December 2016 in connection with the same “allegations relating to employee’s exercise of discretion and investment strategy.”

According to his FINRA BrokerCheck report, financial advisor Cadan has been the subject of eleven (11) customer complaints and, in November of 2012, he filed a petition for relief under Chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

If you are an individual or institutional investor who has any concerns about your investments with Morgan Stanley, please contact us for a no-cost and no-obligation evaluation of your specific facts and circumstances. You may have a viable claim for recovery of your investment losses by filing an individual securities arbitration claim with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

As reported by Gretchen Morgenson in The New York Times on January 13, 2017 (“S.E.C. Inertia on Paybacks Adds to Investor Harm”), when securities laws are broken and investors get hurt, the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission is charged with the responsibility to ride to the rescue, using its regulatory muscle to extract penalties that can be returned to victims.

Unfortunately, it is one thing to persuade a wrongdoer to pay reparations and quite another to get the SEC to disburse the money to aggrieved investors.

Case in point: in August 2015, when the S.E.C. struck a settlement with Citigroup over an exotic investment strategy known as ASTA, MAT and Falcon, an investment strategy involving municipal bonds that the bank sold to clients from 2002 to 2008, the SEC fined Citigroup approximately $180 million and ordered the creation of a so-called “fair fund” to be distributed to investors.
That was over 16 months ago. Today, the wronged investors are not only still awaiting their money, but they have yet to see any plan outlining how the $180 million will be distributed.

Fair funds were established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002; they allow the S.E.C. to exact civil penalties in addition to recovering ill-gotten gains, a process known as disgorgement.

But as noted in the article, “the pace of the Citigroup restitution plan seems especially glacial. And it raises questions about how these plans are administered and whether those overseeing them are rewarded for slowing down the process.”
The New York Times article includes extensive quotes from the Resident Partner in the New York City office of our firm: “To me, it comes down to a bureaucratic quagmire of indifference and concealment,’ said Steven B. Caruso, a lawyer at Maddox Hargett & Caruso in New York City. There is simply no transparency in this process, and no effort being made by the S.E.C. to recognize that these are funds that belong to other people.”

Maddox Hargett & Caruso, P.C. represented hundreds of investors who had been deceived in connection with their ASTA, MAT and Falcon investments and, in 2011, it served as co-counsel in connection with an arbitration award that forced Citigroup to pay nearly $54 million (including $17 million of punitive damages) to two (2) individuals – an award that still stands as one of the largest arbitration recoveries ever obtained on behalf of retail investors in the history of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”).

The complete New York Times article can be accessed at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/ business/fair-game-gretchen-morgenson-investors-regulators-.html?ref=business.

If you are an individual or institutional investor who has any concerns about your investments with any brokerage firm or investment advisor, please contact us for a no-cost and no-obligation evaluation of your specific facts and circumstances. You may have a viable claim for recovery of your investment losses by filing an individual securities arbitration claim with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

The S&P 500,which is widely considered one of the best measures of the U.S. stock market, finished the year up over 11%. After some significant ups and downs over the past few years, the price of oil stabilized and posted some nice gains over the second part of 2016. So why did I lose money or break-even in my brokerage accounts for 2016? This is an important question that needs a closer look. A well-diversified portfolio should be up in 2016. In my experience, there are a few things that can cause investors to lose money when the market is up. Ask yourself these questions:

1.Was my account being traded too often with lots of buying and selling, called churning?
2.Do I have concentrated positions (a significant percentage of my investments)  in things that dropped in value?
3.Is my broker getting me into investments at a high price and selling me out at a lower price?

If your answer to any one of these questions is “yes,” and your losses exceed $50,000, you should contact an experienced securities arbitration attorney for a complimentary review of your potential case. Our firm represents individual and institutional investors in cases against financial advisors, and we are happy to give you a free initial evaluation.

According to FINRA’s Brokercheck public database, former Granger, IN Ameriprise broker Radcliffe (Cliffe) Daly was suspended by FINRA for the improper sales of the common stock of Sloud, Inc. Daly allegedly sold this Sloud penny-stock by mismarking order tickets as “unsolicited” when in reality the transactions were solicited by him. According to FINRA, Daly made 292 mismarked transactions in Sloud stock for 43 customers.

If you are an individual or institutional investor who has any concerns about any of your investments made with Cliffe Daly or Ameriprise Financial Services, please contact us for a free initial evaluation.