The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
August, 2011 by Diana Britton and featured in RegisteredRep: The independent broker/dealer landscape is lately littered with tales of woe — scores of smaller firms have gone up in a puff of smoke over the past two years due to everything from troubled private placements to insufficient net capital. In February of this year, independent broker/dealer QA3 Financial announced it would close its doors following an arbitration related to Regulation D products. Just over a month later, at the end of April, Ameriprise Financial said it would be selling Securities America, its IBD arm, while the firm was in the middle of finalizing a settlement agreement with investors related to private placements. And at the beginning of June, it surfaced that Harrison Douglas, a small IBD of about 28 advisors, would be...