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Four of the six charges against former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso have been overturned regarding his $187.5 million compensation package. The final outcome?

Grasso will settle the case
NY State will not pursue the case
Grasso lost his reputation, regardless
Not Spitzer's worst decision but up there

Previous Polls

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Commissions/TCA Department

Industry News

SEC to Advise Mutual Fund Boards on Trading Desk Oversight

Buyside traders may soon find themselves under more scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to issue guidelines for mutual fund boards to aid them in their oversight of fund company trading practices.

State Street Buys Commission Management Specialists

With a stroke, State Street Global Markets greatly enhanced its commission management services. The broker-dealer arm of the investment monolith on Tuesday (March 11) purchased technology vendor FinancialSockets for its commission management expertise, as well as to provide its institutional buyside customers a complete range of those services.

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Articles from Traders Magazine

Get Used to It:

Postmortem analysis is nearly a cultural obsession. Witness the popularity of ESPN's "SportsCenter," which may be trumped only by daily postmortems relating to the U.S. presidential campaign. A viewer cannot turn on the television without a review of how a candidate might have improved her chances, or how he "misspoke" and certainly how each event had a cumulative effect on the (still forecast) outcome of the election.

Opportunities through TCA

Trade-cost analysis (TCA) will become more important to the buyside. TCA will also become a more valuable tool to lessen the costs of trading. Those were the opinions of 99 buyside trading professionals in a Traders Magazine survey on trade-cost analysis conducted 13 months ago. In fact, 78 percent of those polled said that TCA will not only get better as a predictive tool, but nearly 60 percent said it will become a larger part of their compensation formula. That survey foreshadowed some of the strategies chronicled in last's month's cover story, "Old Dogs, New Tricks." The feature outlined how two large buyside shops-AllianceBernstein and Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM)-are supporters of using quantitative tools in their quest to trade stocks more cheaply and efficiently.

Canada Eases Soft Dollar Regs

Unbundling is still on the radar in Canada, but less so. The country's national regulatory body, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), after criticism from industry, pulled back from a 2006 proposal requiring more documentation of how money managers use commissions. Instead of mandating an account-by-account split of the costs-research and execution-inherent in commission spending, the CSA is now proposing that money managers provide more qualitative and less quantitative disclosure.

Labor Dept. Retreats on Soft Dollars

A decision by the U.S. Department of Labor to back off from stringent new disclosure rules covering soft dollars has the industry sighing with relief. Sources warn, however, that the final rules, part of a revision of Form 5500, are still confusing and potentially onerous. "The alternative rule they have established is responsive to our concerns," Liz Varley, a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association vice president and director of retirement policy, told Traders Magazine. "There is now an alternative way to describe the soft-dollar impact to plan sponsors without going all the way toward having to calculate some kind of number on a per-plan basis, which would be nearly impossible to do."

SEC Drops Soft-Dollar Disclosure

The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to issue new guidelines for mutual fund boards this quarter intended to help them identify conflicts of interest with soft-dollar arrangements. While intended to further the SEC's goal of ensuring that fund boards more vigorously police their managers' commission spending, the expected guidelines aren't as far-reaching as those the regulator previously indicated it planned to issue.

2007 Review: SEC Greenlights CCAs

The battle for commission dollars got much hotter in 2007 as the buyside changed the way it conducted its execution and research spending.