RIA Compliance Blog
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a Risk Alert on February 27 designed to help firms detect and prevent unauthorized trading in brokerage and advisory accounts. Carlo di Florio, director of the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examination, stated, “Unauthorized trading is not a new problem, and the risks it poses should be a perennial concern to financial firms as well as to regulators. We hope that the observations shared in the Risk Alert will be helpful for firms as they review their compliance and supervisory controls to detect and deter unauthorized trading.”
The Risk Alert defines the term “unauthorized trading” as a broad range of activities, including: (1) rogue or other unauthorized trading or trade execution in customer or client or propriety accounts, (2) exceeding firm limits on position exposures, risk tolerances and losses, (3) intentional mismarking of positions, and (4) creating records of nonexistent (or sham) transactions. If a firm notices a change in trading patterns, a high volume of trade cancellations or corrections, manual trade adjustments, or unexplained profits for a particular trader or client, then the firm may need to apply additional scrutiny.
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