The Securities Litigation & Consulting Group (SLCG) has done what regulators have repeatedly declined to do — published the worst ranked brokerage firms in the securities industry.

“What we found is the worst brokerage firms over the past 10 years which are still in business remain the worst firms,” said Craig McCann, CFA, PhD, and founder of SLCG, said in the firm’s white paper “Rating Brokerage Firms by Their Complaint Histories Rather Than by Their Brokers’ Histories.”

The findings of SLCG’s exhaustive, first-of-its-kind research are explosive and come from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s own BrokerCheck data from 2007-2016, which SLCG has sliced and diced to rank the “Worst Brokerage Firms.”  

“The worst of these firms are truly extraordinary,” McCann said. While “only 2.6 percent of the brokers at firms with more than 200 brokers have customer complaints, Aegis Capital (24.49 percent) and Newbridge Securities Corp. (24.27 percent) employ bad brokers (with complaints) at nearly 10 times that rate (see Table 1 below),” McCann said.  “The worst 12 firms down through Bethel Fisher (Table 1 below) have five times that complaint level” of the industry average of 2.6 percent, he added.

Aegis Capital and Newbridge did not return calls for comment by press time.

Santander Securities LLC said the firm works hard to resolve complaints and has enhanced its compliance, risk management, legal and control functions over the past several years. "The vast majority of complaints referenced in this study are related to Puerto Rico, which has experienced an historic economic downturn," a company statement said. "We do not believe the Puerto Rico complaints represent an accurate measure of SSLLC’s sales or supervisory practices."

TABLE 1

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