In his first step as head of retail brokerage at Morgan Stanley, James Gorman has streamlined the firm’s regional office structure -- reducing regional offices to four from eight and cutting out one layer of management. To head up the new...

The SEC hit Bear Stearns with a $250 million penalty for securities fraud for facilitating market-timing and late trading for certain institutional customers to the detriment of others.

Merrill Lynch agreed today to pay a $5 million NASD fine to settle charges that the firm’s brokerage client call centers were out of control.

Merrill Lynch agreed Monday to pay an SEC fine of $2.5 million to settle charges that it had impeded a government investigation into its business practices by dragging its feet on turning over email records.

The market for insurance protection against kidnapping and wildfires is limited. Yet, when you throw in coverage against employee lawsuits, identity theft and other high-end risks advisors may have something different to offer their affluent...

Dumont has been reversed, but the appellate court's holding is so narrow that fiduciaries should not take heart. In fact, they should stay afraid -- very afraid. Stock concentrations are still dangerous and fiduciaries may get slammed for them...

File this one under, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Over the past few months, Merrill Lynch executives have met with African-Americans financial advisors to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging systemic racism on the part of the firm.

Are there too many redundant regulators crawling all over Wall Street brokerages? Or, put another way, are federal securities laws crafted in the 1930s still effective 70 years on? And, more important, is a privately owned, for-profit NYSE Group...

Short-sellers have been blamed for the Great Crash of 1929 (turns out unfairly) and all kinds of market manipulation in the years since. But, as investors learned in the three-year bear market, it may not be so smart to be un-hedged all the time...

Today marks the end of the comment period for the NASD proposal requiring more stringent rules governing gift and entertainment practices on Wall Street and, while the NASD won’t say what the response has been until Thursday, the proposal is...