SEC stops pension administrator but 22 million dollars are missing.

This makes me angry and sad at the same time.  The SEC announced that it has shut down American Pension Services, a pension administrator in Utah.

The principal of APS was investing customer money in stuff that he shouldn’t have.  These are retirement funds!  I’m mad because this guy clearly didn’t care what he was doing to people.  I’m sad because the victims will really be hurt.

I sit as the chairperson of the Police Pension Fund for the Town of Jupiter.  It is worth over $50 million dollars.  First of all, it wouldn’t be smart for anyone to steal from cops, they are armed after all (kidding).  But it is a very serious business.  I just can’t imagine someone who has been entrusted with people’s retirement funds to do this.  It’s unconscionable.  There’s a special place in hell for these kinds of people.

The problem for me is, what is the solution?  Do I tell people to only deal with large brokerage firms?  Sometimes they can be a bad choice, too.  A few years ago, a major broker-dealer entered into a settlement with a regulator because of activities in its pension advisory service.  But if you go to a small operation, you run the risk that internal controls are non-existent and your money disappears.

The cure, I think, is vigilance and skepticism.  Nothing is as good as it seems.  And if you don’t get a good explanation, leave.

That’s the view of one lawyer from Jupiter, Palm Beach County, Florida.  I’m Marc Dobin.

A Cold Caller Follows the Rules. News at 11.

I received a call from Steve at Coastal Equities.  It was a New York number.  I was so shocked that he was polite that I forgot to get his last name.

He started into his script about “investment-grade” and I thought “here it comes.”  Then he tried to sell me a Verizon corporate bond.  I just about fell out of my chair.

He didn’t lie to me.  He didn’t oversell the product.  But I wasn’t interested.  We parted ways without any shouting or hurt feelings.  I think.

That’s how it’s done, folks.

That’s the view of one lawyer from Jupiter, Palm Beach County, Florida.  I’m Marc Dobin.

My job was crappy this week. Literally.

I have had a variety of things left on my doorstep over the course of my career.  But Monday’s “present” took the cake.  (Maybe that’s a bad expression in this case).

I was minding my own business when a client texted me that “someone or something defecated outside your door.”  That’s a sentence I never considered I would receive.  I finished my workout (after all, where is that crap going to go?) and went to the office.  The smell in the hallway was unpleasant, to say the least.  It was worse in my office.

The building did its best to clean up the mess.  I took pictures (email me if you want them) and called the police in case there was a serial crapper out there.  One officer, with his trained nose, said it was “definitely human.”  Or, under the circumstances, subhuman.

The mess has been cleaned up.  I don’t have video, so we won’t know who relieved themselves on my office threshold.  So, that was the crappy start to my week.  If the culprit has suffered some ill fate, I would then have a “crap-eating grin”.  I’m pretty sure the quantity was limited to one human.

That’s the crap-filled view of one lawyer from Jupiter, Florida.  I’m Marc Dobin.

FINRA Dispute Resolution Statistics Show No Advantage To All-Public Panel

I keep waiting to be wrong.  In fact, there are many instances where I am wrong.  But I don’t think I am in this instance.

FINRA has released its latest arbitration statistics and the hand-wringing and stat-twisting from the Claimants’ bar will likely continue unabated.

But the numbers are the numbers and here’s what we know through the end of March 2014.  The “win” percentage of all-public panels so far in 2014 was 33%.  The “win” percentage of majority-public panels was 43%.  Isn’t that a surprise?  So, again I ask – What was the purpose of this change?  It’s like the placebo portion of the test is getting healthier than the patients taking the test medication.

Worse still, the numbers have flipped.  If we include all of 2013 and the first three months of 2014, the all-public panels are at 42% and the majority-public panels are at 44%.  And the numbers are trending up, not down.

So I ask again – Why did we do this?  Will the Claimants’ bar now allege that even the all-public panels, devoid of any industry panelist influence, are still biased against claimants?  Or is it, as I have thought all along, that crappy cases go to hearing and the Claimants’ bar thinks, apparently without basis, that an all-public panel will be comfortable with wool over its eyes.

That’s the admittedly smug view of one lawyer from Jupiter, Palm Beach County, Florida.  I’m Marc Dobin.

Reflecting on Three Mile Island – 35 years later.

I was in my second semester as a freshman at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.  We had returned from Spring Break on Sunday.  We started hearing about environmental issues on the radio starting around Wednesday.  Then we found out there was a problem with a nuclear reactor about 30 miles to the West.

By Friday, we were told that we were being sent home for a couple days.  We were told that it was not a safety concern, but precautionary.  But the rumors flew.  One was that F&M was going to be used as an evacuation area.

I remembered that there was a girl down the hall whose family lived in Middletown, where Three Mile Island was located.  She couldn’t get through on the phones (three years before cell phones).  I tried to call home.  My first call clicked about 6 times then died.  The second time I ended up talking to an operator with a Southern accent.

I packed up and went home, five days after I had returned.  Some students thought they’d hang out and, dare I say it, abuse their bodies with alcohol and other substances (They’re lawyers and doctors now).  But the campus was going to be closed.

We were told to call on Monday to find out when to return.  The school remained closed the entire week for “Radiation Vacation” or the shorter “Nuke Break.”  I actually went to see The China Syndrome with a girl I dated off and on.  There’s a point in the movie where one of the characters says something to the effect of “If the reactor melts down, it could go all the way to China” which is how the move got its name.

This incident prompted a lot of discussion about nuclear power and energy policies in general.  Guess what?  I don’t think much has changed.  But when I was driving to Orlando this week, I got to thinking about Radiation Vacation.  I wonder how much longer we’ll be able to drive around in our personal transportation vehicles before we run out of fermenting dinosaurs and plants that power our cars.  Could Elon Musk be onto something?  Maybe I need to buy a Tesla after all.