Bloomberg
Four days before Merrill Lynch & Co. stopped supporting the auction-rate securities market and left thousands of individual investors stuck with securities they couldn’t sell, the firm’s analysts recommended clients buy. “Reports of the imminent demise of the auction market seem to be greatly exaggerated, again,” analyst Kevin Conery wrote in a Feb. 8 research […]
Bloomberg
Let’s say you had $50,000 in auction- rate securities that your broker said were as safe as money- market funds. The market collapsed and you sold at an 80 percent haircut. At your arbitration hearing, one of the three panel members works at a firm that also sold auction rates deceptively. How fair will the […]
Miami Herald
A handful of investors in hedge funds run by Key Biscayne bond trader John Devaney filed arbitration claims in the year before the funds collapsed, seeking to recoup their losses from his broker-dealer affiliate, United Capital Markets. The hedge funds, managed by United Capital Asset Management, an affiliate of United Capital Markets, were pronounced dead […]
New York Times
How much is your investment worth? That might seem like a simple question on Wall Street, where the price of everything from Apple to zinc flickers across computer screens every day. But inside Bear Stearns, the answer was anything but clear last spring for investors who put their money into two giant, but ultimately doomed, […]
Bloomberg
Bear Stearns Cos. hedge fund manager Ralph Cioffi raised a vodka toast to his own survival on March 2, 2007, after posting a 0.08 percent loss in one of the subprime mortgage securities portfolios he was managing, according to a federal criminal indictment filed yesterday. “We have our health and families,” Cioffi told fellow portfolio […]