Practice

Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. has been fined $1 million for supervisory failures that allowed a Texas broker to run a Ponzi scheme.

Marketing expert Marie Swift details a strategy that works for financial advisors and allied professionals who are interested in serving families with significant wealth. And while this strategy works especially well for that demographic, the truly high-net-worth crowd, there are also applications for advisors who serve the middle-market millionaire and mass affluent.

Renaissance Capital has installed trade surveillance software from Redkite Financial Markets.

State Street said it acquired Complementa Investment-Controlling AG, a Swiss supplier of investment performance measurement and analytics services.

CME Group said it set new monthly records for clearing both interest rate swaps and credit default swaps.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is warning broker-dealers it will scrutinize the procedures they use to ensure they don't run afoul of the new market access rule when dealing in subaccounts used by disreputable day traders.

Got downside protection? That's the question many 401(k) plan sponsors and investors are now asking.

The nation's stock exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are filing proposals that will trigger halts in trading, marketwide, more quickly, the Securities and Exchange Commission said. The changes are proposed for marketwide "circuit breakers," which key off drops in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Janus has just launched a new online retirement income program for financial advisers, called Janus Time Segmentation Framework. The surprising part: it seems better designed for advisers than it does for their clients.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is warning broker-dealers it will scrutinize the procedures they use to ensure they don't run afoul of the new market access rule when dealing in subaccounts used by disreputable day traders.