Law and regulation

Here are 10 global investment predictions for 2012 that advisors and their clients should be monitoring through the rest of the year.

Going forward, investment advisors will no longer be able to include the value of an investor's home in a new $1 million minimum of investable assets now required to charge performance fees, according to the SEC, which is tightening its rule around fees.

What terms will you need to get familiar with as clearing of what can be considered exchange-traded swaps starts up? Here’s one answer, in a gallery of key acronyms.

Seventeen muni groups are urging members of Congress to reject President Obama's proposal to place a 28% cap on the value of tax-exempt interest, warning it will hurt the market and that its retroactivity will reverse nearly 100 years of legislative history.

NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext, has launched a post-trade monitoring tool for compliance officers.

A year ago, the firm’s more than 4,000 advisors in the United States had to manually submit each post in advance for review. Now, Raymond James Financials has automated the compliance and publishing process, to speed up communications with customers.

The Department of Justice announced that it filed a notice with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to dismiss its antitrust lawsuit regarding the potential merger of Deutsche Boerse AG and NYSE Euronext.

The global effort by the U.S. government to catch American tax cheats intensified this week as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom agreed to support a broad new U.S. law requiring foreign financial institutions to disclose information about the foreign bank accounts of U.S. citizens.

Clarifying Form 1099-R would help the Internal Revenue Service identify more taxpayers who are underreporting their retirement income, according to a new report.

UBS is expanding its compliance database to include information on environmental and social risks, which will be applied to companies, prospective sourcing partners and investment clients to ferret out controversy that could impact the bank's reputation and financial performance.

Wall Street's own watchdog filed a complaint against Charles Schwab Corp., accusing the online brokerage giant of requiring customers to waive their rights to pursue certain legal action against the firm, a violation of industry rules.

Authority details its top concerns in a letter directed to the industry’s compliance officers.

NYSE Euronext said it would focus on its “standalone strategy,’’ while Deutsche Boerse declared this a ‘black day’ after the European Commission prohibited the merger of the two exchange operators.

Antitrust regulators in Europe stopped the merger of Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext on Wednesday, saying the combined group would have a stranglehold of the listed European futures market and would thwart new entrants.

One senator calls the proposal not nearly tough enough.

Our legal expert explains what discretion you have with the account of a client who passes away.

Head of Americas Investment Strategy at Barclays Wealth discusses how investors can look at this year's presidential election.

FINRA has filed an enforcement complaint against David Lerner, the operator of a brokerage aimed at retail investors, claiming he misled investors when he tried to quell customer concern about an action taken against his firm for its marketing of real estate securities.

The SEC sanctioned Florida-based 1st Discount Brokerage and a former executive vice president for failing to supervise an advisor who was operating a Ponzi scheme.

The firm joins several others, including Ladenburg Thalmann, Cetera and LPL Financial, to offer subsidized FSI memberships to advisors.