A new omnibus spending bill announced by US lawmakers contains an interesting provision: "None of the funds made available by any division of this act shall be used by the Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize, issue or implement any rule, regulation or order regarding the disclosure...
Updated 2:39pm on 12-9-2015 They got tucked into a transportation bill (Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act or the FAST Act), but with a deft set of amendments the Reforming Access for Investments in Startup Enterprises Act of 2015 (or the RAISE Act) and other small business initiatives...
Last week, the US Supreme Court said it would not hear a case in which the appeals court overturned two insider trading convictions. By refusing to hear the case, they effectively let stand the decision below, which many say will make it much tougher to...
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) regulates US broker-dealers, a "self-regulatory organization" run by the brokers themselves and overseen by the SEC. A very popular online resource is called BrokerCheck, which lets you pretty easily check the regulatory history and licenses held by broker-dealers and...
We all know about the famous letter from one Virginia O'Hanlon in 1897 to the New York Sun newspaper asking if there really is a Santa Claus. Her father encouraged her and told her, if it's in the Sun it must be so. The paper wrote an editorial entitled,...
Sometimes good things happen to good people. In this case folks filing public offerings and other registrations with the SEC will see a reduction in filing fees. The agency made the announcement yesterday. As of October 2015, the start of the SEC's fiscal year, the...
The SEC released proposed rules required by the Dodd-Frank Act a few weeks ago. The proposal, if adopted, would require public companies to compare senior executives' compensation with the actual performance of the company, measured by a shareholder return metric. "Emerging growth companies" (EGCs) will...
If you are an investor or make your money from the market or Wall Street, there's not much to be unhappy about as we close out 2014. The Dow Jones Industrial Average in the last year has gone from around 15,300 to about 18,100, up...
There was a time in the 2000s during the boom of Chinese companies' entering the US public markets when executives visiting from the PRC knew only one thing in English: "OTCBB." Officially known as the OTC Bulletin Board and owned and operated by the Financial...
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, primarily a response to the fraud perpetrated by energy giant Enron and not detected by their then accountants, brought some good. However, in my view it was mostly an overreaction to a very limited issue, and thankfully its impact on...