Practice

The Securities and Exchange Commission has upheld an administrative judge's ruling that a mutual fund trader must pay more than $200,000 in penalties for accepting gifts from broker-dealers to steer trades their way. The regulator didn't buy the trader's excuse that the mutual funds weren't harmed.

Donald Johnson, 57, was sentenced for engaging in insider trading on multiple occasions based on material, non-public information he obtained in his capacity as a Nasdaq executive. Johnson also was ordered to forfeit $755,066.

Since I’m such a big proponent of using free publicity versus paid advertising as a business growth strategy, advisors often ask me if it ever makes sense to advertise. In a word, yes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Friday launched its whistleblower program, launching a Web page to collect “original information’’ about securities laws violations.

They're an elongated equivalent of a ticker tape. Instead of four-character symbols and another four characters of pricing information, they're 140 characters of insight and links to deeper information.

Ever wonder what one second of high-frequency trading actually looks like? Here's a video that slows down the flow of market data and transactions flowing through one second of trading. See if you can follow what's going on.

Forty-two percent of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, down slightly from the 43% who were in this financial state in 2010, CareerBuilder found in a survey of 5,200 workers. This 42% level is at pre-recession levels, indicating that while incremental, household finances are improving.

A recent report from HSBC shows that people across the West -- including the U.S. -- are generally pessimistic about their retirement prospects while those in the East are relatively optimistic. And yet, by every objective measure, citizens in Western developed countries control significantly more assets per capita than their counterparts in Eastern emerging economies. This inconsistency begs the question: Are we ever satisfied?

Rather than offer the complete lineup of a target-date series in their 401(k) plan, sponsors are selecting only those funds that fit the age and demographics of their employees. This could result in under-funded target-date funds that could put the entire lineup in jeopardy, according to a new report, “Trends in Date-Date Portfolios on Recordkeeper Platforms,” from Financial Research Corp.

Institutional traders trying to move large blocks of stock in the face of market swings are driving venues such as Liquidnet to new volume records.