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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zia Sun(zsun) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (8951)	7/24/2000 9:49:31 PM
From: who cares?	Respond to of 10354

dailynews.yahoo.com Doom for scummy "advisers" that rope people into there stable of scummy companies and sue those that dare speak the truth. Monday July 24 05:15 PM EDT Advisers Fear SEC Database Plan By Doug Brown, Inter@ctive Week The Securities and Exchange Commission intends to build a public database that will dramatically open to consumers the disciplinary records, financial practices and business methods of the roughly 8,100 federally registered investment adviser firms in the U.S. that together manage portfolios totaling $18 trillion. The investment adviser community generally welcomes the increased transparency, but it has significant problems with elements of the SEC's overhaul of the new registration process, said David Tittsworth, executive director at the Washington, D.C.-based Investment Counsel Association of America, the trade association representing investment advisers. These changes being contemplated are the biggest and most fundamental changes that have occurred since the Investment Advisers Act of 1940," Tittsworth said. Among the data available online would be advisers' educational background; their experience; whether they have had any disciplinary problems; what the firm charges for its labor; what the firm discloses regarding potential conflicts of interest; what the brokerage practices are; and how they allocated hot initial public offerings, he said. The online database, he said, "has implications for all of the media types, who will be able to have more information than they've ever had before. Public officials and regulators will have more information about the profession as a whole, and competitors will have more information about each other." To date, 48 organizations have responded to the SEC's proposal by writing letters, all of which are posted on the SEC's Web site. Most of the firms' letters applaud the SEC's move to electronic form, but also admonish the SEC for requiring too much from industry to satisfy the new regulations. For example, Marianne Smythe at the law firm Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering criticized an SEC requirement to collect Social Security numbers and birth dates - to be posted on the nonpublic part of the Web site. "To require this disclosure is to put these people at risk that this highly sensitive information will be misappropriated," she wrote. "We have seen that systems, even those supposedly highly secure, are susceptible to hacking." Andrew J. Bowden, deputy general counsel and vice president at Legg Mason, which manages more than $100 billion in investments annually, was critical of the requirement to post criminal charges brought against advisers. "Information about felony misdemeanor charges will be meaningless to investors," Bowden's letter said. "It usually reveals that an individual committed a youthful indiscretion prior to his or her employment in the securities industry. Such information will not aid investors in evaluating an adviser's qualifications or ability." Cindy Fornelli, senior adviser to the director of the SEC's division of investment management, acknowledged industry's problems with the proposed changes to the registration system, saying the push to post everything on the Web "seems to be causing some people anxiety." But the change makes sense for companies in the industry, which will be able to use the single federal form for all of their state filings; for consumers, who will have access to much more helpful information about investment advisers; and for the SEC, which will use much less paper for the registration process. Tittsworth said his members are most concerned about the breadth of the new form advisers will fill out for the SEC. The proposed form asks companies to submit far too much information. Fulfilling the requirements, he said, would be burdensome.