Periodically, Bailyn, also a registered rep with San Diego-based First Allied Securities, will do a few blog posts about investment products and submit them simultaneously to Finra for approval. "The rest of the year, I'll blog about the economy or financial planning."
Finra lets you comment on investment products, he says, but if the investment has a prospectus you must file the comment with the regulatory group and get approval. Often, Finra will make cumbersome changes, watering down your important points.
Say you want to blog about exchange-traded funds. Finra, he says, might add words like "potentially" or "possibly," or modify things that leave room for interpretation so it becomes vaguer.
For example, if you want to say exchange-traded fund pricing is worse at the very beginning and very end of the day, Finra might insert specific times, along with extraneous words, such as "please contact your investment advisor for verification," Bailyn notes. The organization doesn't want investors to start trading exchange-traded funds in any particular way because of something an advisor posted.
Bailyn has a filter on comments his blog receives. "None get posted until after I read them, and I end up denying the majority," he says. "A lot are people trying to drop notes about their Web sites or firms-garbage. They have nothing to do with my article.
"If someone says, 'You invest in exchange-traded funds, but I like mutual funds,' I'll delete it," he adds. "As the rules work, anything that is offered by anyone in a prospectus should be deleted."